The University Center for Human Values is delighted to announce its newly appointed Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellows for the academic year 2023-2024.

Daniel Fryer, University of Michigan

Daniel Fryer is an assistant professor of law and philosophy at the University of Michigan. His work is informed by scholarship in social and political philosophy, law, history, and public policy. He is also influenced by social movements and intellectual discourse outside the academy. Daniel’s recent research focuses on assessing how we should construct legal and political institutions to respond to various forms of social and economic inequality; the history of African American political thought; criminal justice reform; and race theory. While at Princeton, he will be working on a set of articles on reparative justice. 

Zoe Jenkin, Washington University in St. Louis 

Zoe Jenkin is an assistant professor in the philosophy department and philosophy-neuroscience-psychology program at Washington University in St. Louis. She works in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of psychology. Her research comprises two intertwined strands: the nature of perception and reasoning, and our normative evaluations of these mental processes. In recent work, she has argued that perception is sensitive to our reasons in a similar way to that in which beliefs are. Her recent papers include “The Epistemic Role of Core Cognition” (Philosophical Review), “Crossmodal Basing” (Mind), and “Perceptual Learning and Reasons-Responsiveness” (Noûs). At the UCHV, she will be working on a book titled “The Epistemic Self”, which concerns the question of when and how we are responsible for our unconscious and automatic thoughts and actions. 

Tae-Yeoun Keum, University of California, Santa Barbara

Tae-Yeoun Keum is an assistant professor in political theory at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research concerns the symbolic dimensions of politics: to what extent can and should politics be shaped by figurative elements in our thinking - such as symbols, metaphors, and narratives - that are not immediately transparent to reason? Her first book, "Plato and the Mythic Tradition in Political Thought" (Harvard University Press, 2020), explored this question through the lens of Plato's myths and their reception in modern political thought. The project she will be working on at UCHV is provisionally titled "The Symbolic Politics of Blumenberg, Habermas, and Schmitt." It will place the work of Hans Blumenberg, the twentieth-century philosopher of myth and metaphor, in dialogue with those of his contemporaries.

Shen-yi Liao, University of Puget Sound

Shen-yi Liao is an associate professor at University of Puget Sound in the philosophy department, and also affiliated with the Asian studies, bioethics, gender & queer studies, and neuroscience interdisciplinary programs. His research interests are in cognitive science and social philosophy. At Princeton, he will continue to write about oppressive objects and spaces that extend, but also distort, our cognitive capacities, such as photographic technologies that bias how we see and medical devices that bias how we diagnose. You can find his work in academic journals such as American Journal of Bioethics and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and also popular outlets such as The Emancipator and Psyche. He also has research interests in imagination, experimental philosophy, aesthetics, and language.

Shaun Ossei-Owusu, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School

Shaun Ossei-Owusu is a Presidential Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. He completed his J.D. and Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley. There are two planks in his research agenda. His first body of work focuses on how governments meet their legal obligations to provide protections and benefits to poor people and racial minorities. His first book project, "The People’s Champ: Legal Aid from Slavery to Mass Incarceration", attends to these themes and will be published by Harvard University Press. He also works on social stratification in legal education and the legal profession. At Princeton, he will complete his second book manuscript, which is under contract with Liveright and is tentatively titled, "Renegade at Law: How Our Legal Industry Creates, Justifies, and Compounds Inequality". This project builds on his second line of work, which focuses on social stratification in legal education and in different corners of the legal profession. 

Andrew Sepielli, University of Toronto

Andrew Sepielli is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. His work on meta-ethics, normative ethics, and the philosophy of law has been published in such journals as Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Nous, Ergo, Philosophical Studies, and Law and Philosophy. His first book, “Pragmatist Quietism: a Meta-Ethical System” (OUP, 2022), defends the view that morality is objective, but also radically autonomous; moral theory neither requires nor admits of vindication from other areas of philosophy like metaphysics, the philosophy of language, epistemology, or the theory of practical rationality. While at Princeton, Andrew will be working on a second book, tentatively entitled “Ethics From the Eye of a Stranger.” It focuses on the methodological question of how we ought to conceptualize the world for the purposes of moral inquiry, drawing on research in the psychology and neuroscience of moral judgment.

Shatema Threadcraft, Vanderbilt University

Shatema Threadcraft is an associate professor of gender and sexuality studies, philosophy and political science at Vanderbilt University. She works on African American political thought, feminist political theory and feminist philosophy. She is the author of "Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic" (Oxford University Press, 2016), winner of the National Women’s Studies Association’s 2017 Sara A. Whaley Award for the best book on women andlabor, the 2017 W.E.B. Du Bois Distinguished Book Award from the National Conference of Black Political Scientists and the 2017 Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association's Race, Ethnicity and Politics Organized Section (Best Book in Race and Political Theory). She was the 2017-2018 Ralph E. and Doris M. Hansmann Member at the Institute for Advanced Study and a visiting research associate in the department of political studies at University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg from 2009-2012. Her research has been supported by Harvard’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition. As an LSR Fellow she will complete a project on necropolitics and democratic necromancy.

James Lindley Wilson, University of Chicago

James Lindley Wilson is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Most of his work focuses on normative democratic theory, including the moral evaluation of democracy and what democratic ideals require of citizens and institutions. His book, “Democratic Equality” (Princeton University Press, 2019), articulates the moral force of the democratic idea that all citizens are equal political authorities, and explains how that abstract idea ought to regulate the design and operation of political institutions.  Jim also writes on the history of political thought (with emphasis on democratic thought), including the work of Aristotle, Kant, and the Federalists. His current work addresses the relationship of democracy and individual autonomy; global political justice; the relationship between claims based on contemporary injustice and claims to reparation of past injustice; and moral problems occasioned by democratic backsliding and political violence. He has published articles in Philosophy & Public Affairs, the American Political Science Review, Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, Political Theory, and the Review of Politics.

The UCHV community looks forward to welcoming all of you to campus in a few short months!