Sara Denne is a first year PhD student in the Religious Studies Department where her work centers around questions of the ethics of suffering and evil in modern thought. For the last several years, she has been most interested in the intersection of modern Jewish and Christian thought with first-person testimonies of the Holocaust and literary narratives about evil. In past work, she has written about self-formation, mystical responses to suffering, and ethics within dehumanization, focusing on philosophers such as Emmanuel Levinas, Stanley Cavell, and Paul Ricoeur. Primarily, she is interested in the ways in which extreme experiences challenge Western philosophical conceptions of the self, freedom, and ethics.