Welcome

I'm Alexandra, an Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Teaching Stream at the University of Toronto. I am also Director of Educational Programming at Being and Becoming: A Community for the Curious, a Toronto-based public philosophy non-profit. I completed my PhD in Philosophy at the University of Toronto in 2024. I completed my MA at Brandeis University and my BA at The College of Wooster. 

Philosophically, I am primarily interested in the nature and experience of romantic love, especially unrequited love (in 2022, I wrote an essay for Psyche defending the value of unrequited love on the grounds that it is just as "sublime" as reciprocal love). From 2020 to 2023 my research on love was funded by the Government of Canada through a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Canada Graduate Scholarship. This culminated in my doctoral thesis, "Arrested Attention: Essays on the Phenomenology of Love." In it, I argue that contemporary analytic philosophers of love ought to pay more attention to the way that love feels (in particular, to an experience that I call "arrested attention").

Beyond love, I have additional interests in ethics, aesthetics, and existentialism, along with a growing interest in the intersection of AI ethics and the philosophy of disability.

You can reach me at a.gustafson@mail.utoronto.ca or alexandra@beingnbecoming.org.