Rachel Catherine Elliott

 

Rachel Catherine Elliott is a Doctoral Lecturer in Philosophy at the City University of New York (College of Staten Island). She specializes in contemporary phenomenology, particularly themes such as intercorporeality, affectivity, temporality, and improvisation as they pertain to social experiences. She has published on the improvisatory nature of we-experiences in online contexts as well as on the temporality of disability. She recently completed a book project which looks at music as a transformative embodied experience.

Rachel previously worked as an Assistant Professor (2.5 year term) at Brandon University in Manitoba, Canada. She was the principal investigator on a project exploring the embodied nature of online choirs through the qualitative research method of the phenomenological interview. She developed and taught courses such as Philosophical Approaches to Music, Embodied Cognition, and Social and Political Philosophy.

Rachel obtained her PhD in Philosophy from the University of Guelph in 2019, during which time she also produced and hosted a podcast for the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation that explored community building through improvised arts using interviews, archival material, and creative sound design. The title of her dissertation was “Collaborative Temporality: Merleau-Ponty and the Phenomenology of Music.”

Prior to pursuing her PhD, Rachel completed an MA in Philosophy at the University of Toronto, and an Honours BA in Philosophy from McGill, specializing in Feminist Philosophy, before taking a teaching position as a CEGEP Professor at Dawson College. During this time she developed and taught courses such as Folk Music, Listening to the World, and Knowledge and Community, while also participating actively in Montreal’s indy music scene.