Tommy's M.A. research looked at the interplay between surface mining law and ‘reclaimed’ landscapes in a coal mining practice known as mountain top removal.  The resulting thesis illustrated how legal discourse and reclamation landscapes work in concert to generate normative truth claims about mountain top removal.  Further, it opens discussion on how mountain top removal’s otherwise cloudy legal apparatus is actualized and legitimized through the really ‘real’ness of reclamation landscapes.    

Tommy’s current work revolves around a loosely defined hauntological approach.  His theoretical interests lie in utilizing oversimplified binaries -   Noumena/phenomena; virtual/actual; event/memory; place/space – to help make sense of an infinite list of over-determined metaphysical quandaries.  The ‘empirical’ objects he has chosen to subject to this whimsical/fatal approach are, however, quite finite.  For instance, in his most recent work Tommy has taken up the notion of life/death in the context of violence/law to sort through questions of absence/presence.  That is, if we agree with Benjamin that law is violence and recirculation of violence, then the gap between (a)life/death are the piece(s) with which order itself is made apparent.  In other words, the memory of violence is the aporetic link in the creation and preservation of order itself. To quote Derrida:

What can happen between the two (life or death), between all the 'two's' you like, can only maintain itself with some ghost, can only talk with or about some ghosts.  (Derrida 1994 xvii)

And so Tommy currently finds himself talking to ghosts.