Danielle LaSusa is a third year Ph.D. student in Temple's Philosophy Department. She grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and completed her undergraduate degree in philosophy at Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois. Her interests are wild and varied, but, for now, can be described as a fuzzy intersection of aesthetics, philosophy of culture, phenomenology, Asian philosophy, existentialism, and feminist philosophy.

Danielle's current investigation explores the collection of artifacts, souvenirs, photographs, art objects, and other memorabilia by individuals and societies, as means to cope with the transience of experience. On the one hand, she believes that these memory objects hold great meaning and serve an important function in personal and cultural narratives; yet, on the other, she believes that many collected objects are often obtained through the sacrifice, avoidance, or bypass of actual enriching experience. Her intellectual ambivalence on this issue and personal expeirence with collecting fuel her passion for this project. She is interested in this question's larger connection to consumer culture, tourism, art restoration and reproduction, museum culture, non-Western and feminist aesthetics, mortality, memory, and forgetting.