LSR fellowships are awarded annually to outstanding scholars and teachers interested in devoting a year at Princeton to writing about ethics and human values, discussing their work in a fellows’ seminar, and participating in seminar activities.

Joshua Bennett is the Distinguished Chair of the Humanities and professor of literature at MIT. He is the author of five books, including Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, 2020), winner of the MLA ’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize, and Spoken Word: A Cultural History (Knopf, 2023), which was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2023. At UCHV, he will work on his next book of criticism, Iridescence: Black Life and The Art of Opacity, which is concerned with the role of dissemblance in African American literature and life. Turning to the works of Ralph Ellison, Anne Spencer, Frederick Douglass, June Jordan, and others, he argues that opacity is often a form of collective self-preservation: a means through which Black culture workers deploy a kind of critical withholding—a commitment that manifests even at the level of the built environment—to protect the people, places, and ideas that made them possible.

Susanna Blumenthal is a scholar of law and history, specializing in the modern United States. She is broadly concerned with the problematics of personhood, focusing more particularly on conceptions of identity, agency, and responsibility. She holds the William L. Prosser Professorship in Law and is also professor of history and co-director of the Program in Law and History at the University of Minnesota. The author of the award-winning Law and the Modern Mind: Consciousness and Responsibility in American Legal Culture (Harvard University Press, 2016), her work has also appeared in such journals as Harvard Law Review, Law and History Review, and Law and Social Inquiry. While at the University Center for Human Values, she will be working on a book about the duplicitous self, titled The Apprehension of Fraud in Modern America. It explores the ambiguous borderland between capitalism and crime in American culture, with the broader aim of illuminating the historical relationship between law and trust.

Sam Fleischacker is the LAS Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois in Chicago. He works on moral and political philosophy, and the philosophy of religion. He is the author of nine books, including Being Me Being You:  Adam Smith and Empathy (University of Chicago, 2019), and The Good and the Good Book (Oxford, 2015).  He taught formerly at Williams College, and received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1989. He has been at UCHV once before, in 1994-95. During his fellowship this time at UCHV, he will be pursuing a project in the philosophy of Judaism:  developing an ethical framework for understanding the point of Jewish law, and for how the Torah can be seen as divinely given even if historical accounts of its human production are correct. 

Colin Jager is a professor of English at Rutgers University. For the past seven years he has also directed the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers. He specializes in Romantic literature, secularism, intellectual history, and religion and literature. His most recent book, Unquiet Things, is a study of the way that modern secularism grew from a set of Romantic-era concepts about literature, tolerance, and minority identities. At UCHV, he will be working on a book entitled Eternity’s Demand: Selfhood After Romanticism, a study of the post-Romantic idea of the self as present-tense, first-personal, and freely chosen.  The project will trace the development of this idea from Kierkegaard through existentialism and into twenty-first century cultural products ranging from hip-hop to novels to film. During his fellowship year, Colin will also be pursuing related projects on “Religion and AI” and on literary ideas of reconciliation. 

Erin I. Kelly is the Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University. She teaches and writes about political philosophy, ethics, and law with a focus on criminal law and justice. In 2022, Kelly won a Pulitzer Prize in biography for a memoir she co-authored with artist Winfred Rembert, Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South (Bloomsbury Press, 2021). Kelly is also author of The Limits of Blame: Rethinking Punishment and Responsibility (Harvard University Press, 2018). She is currently working to develop alternatives to retributive thinking about criminal justice. More broadly, she is interested in philosophical questions related to historical injustice, social inequality, and other threats to democracy. At UCHV she will be writing a book about restorative justice.

Sarah Paul is a professor of philosophy at New York University Abu Dhabi and a Global Network professor of philosophy at NYU. Her work focuses on the intersections between agency, ethics, and epistemology, with a special interest in questions about self-control, self-knowledge, and the nature of practical reason. At UCHV, she will be working on a book called Striving (co-authored with Jennifer Morton), which examines the nature of the agency and reasoning we exhibit when we aim to accomplish difficult long-term goals in the face of uncertainty about the kinds of obstacles we will face, and about what we will ultimately be capable of.    

Cristián Rettig is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at Adolfo Ibáñez University. Cristián earned his Ph.D. from University College London in 2018, where he was also a visiting researcher in 2023, and obtained an M.Sc. in Political Theory from the London School of Economics. His research focuses on rights theory, the theoretical foundations of human rights, moral philosophy, and meta-ethics. A central aim of his work is to explore the concept of rights from the perspective of practical reasoning. Rettig's work has been published in academic journals such as the Journal of Social Philosophy, Journal of Value Inquiry, Ratio Juris (co-authored), Jurisprudence, Journal of Philosophical Research, Journal of Global Ethics, and Social Theory and Practice (co-authored), among others. At UCHV, he will continue his research on conflicts of rights and the role of these normative standards in practical reflection as part of a book project on the same topic.

Wendy Salkin is an assistant professor of philosophy and, by courtesy, of law at Stanford University. Her research is in political philosophy, philosophy of race, Black political thought, and philosophy of law, and intersects with questions in moral philosophy and feminist philosophy. In her recent book, Speaking for Others: The Ethics of Informal Political Representation (Harvard University Press, 2024; 2024 Stefanopoulos Book Prize), she provides a novel systematic conceptual and normative theory of informal political representatives, who speak or act for others despite having been neither elected nor selected to do so by means of a systematized election or selection procedure. Her recent article on judges serving as representatives, “Speaking for Others from the Bench” (Legal Theory, 2023), received the 2025 Fred Berger Memorial Prize. Recent articles in Noûs, The Monist, and The Journal of Political Philosophy discuss informal political representation, W. E. B. Du Bois’s democratic theory, and American abolitionist John Brown. At the Center, Wendy will work on two projects: The first concerns how informal political representation arises within and shapes our academic, political, and legal institutions. The second concerns different social groups’ demands to be politically self-determining and countervailing considerations that may limit the force of such demands.