Toni’s research and teaching span ancient Roman philosophy (specializing on Augustine), intellectual history (focusing on slavery, freedom, rule, and authority), contemporary ethics and politics (idem), and philosophy of religion (especially on religion and morality). His current book project, Slaves of God, explicates Augustine’s philosophical reasons for justifying slavery and argues for the centrality of slavery in his broader ethics and politics. He is in the early stages of research on an intellectual history of penal slavery (tentatively titled Precarious: Penal Slavery and the Rights of Citizens), which will trace the development of penal slavery from its ancient Roman provenances through late antique, medieval, and early modern Christian thought, and into the modern context. Other recent areas of research include: 1) the normative structure of covenants; 2) the meaning of ‘maturity’ in the history of philosophy; 3) whether deities dominate their worshippers; and 4) realism about aesthetic judgments in philosophy and Christian theology.
Toni is a postdoctoral associate in the Classics Department at Cornell University as a Klarman Fellow. He earned the A.B. in Religion from Princeton University, the M.A.R. in Ethics from Yale Divinity School, and the Ph.D. in Religion from Princeton University.