The University Center for Human Values is happy to announce our Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Professors for Distinguished Teaching and Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellows for the 2017-18 academic year.

Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching (2017-18)

John A. Hall is the James McGill Professor of Comparative Historical Sociology at McGill University in Montreal. He has held previous positions at the London School of Economics and Harvard, and has been a Visiting Professor for many years at the University of Copenhagen. He is the author of books dealing with states in history, nationalism, social theory, and liberalism —most recently, Ernest Gellner (Verso, 2010), The Importance of Being Civil (Princeton, 2013), The World of States (with J.L. Campbell, Bloomsbury, 2015) and The Paradox of Vulnerability (with J.L. Campbell, Princeton 2017). While at Princeton, he will be working on the interactions between states, empires, and nations.

Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching (Spring 2018)

Lori Gruen is the William Griffin Professor of Philosophy at Wesleyan University.  She is also a professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and coordinator of Wesleyan Animal Studies.  She is the author and editor of nine books, including Ethics and Animals: An Introduction (Cambridge, 2011); Entangled Empathy (Lantern, 2015); Reflecting on Nature: Readings in Environmental Philosophy and Ethics (Oxford, 2012), The Ethics of Captivity (Oxford, 2014).  She is a past editor of the leading journal of feminist philosophy, Hypatia; is a Fellow of the Hastings Center for Bioethics; a Faculty Fellow at Tufts’ Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine’s Center for Animals and Public Policy.  Her work in practical ethics and social and political philosophy is concerned with those often overlooked: women, people of color, incarcerated people, and non-human animals.

Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellows

Stephanie Beardman specializes in ethics and moral psychology. She is interested in diachronic rationality, the nature of practical reasons, and in the relevance of scientific studies to ethics.  She received her Ph.D. from Rutgers University and has been an Assistant Professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, and a postdoctoral fellow in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program at Washington University in St. Louis. Last year she received a grant from The Experience Project: The Philosophy of Transformative Experience. Her current research project at the University Center, Rational Choice and Dementia: Decision-making for Those Who May Lose Themselves, explores core decision-theoretic, metaphysical, and ethical aspects of dementia.

Mitchell Berman is the Leon Meltzer Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also holds appointments in Philosophy and at the Wharton School’s Legal Studies and Business Ethics Department.  He writes and teaches in constitutional law and theory, philosophy of criminal law, jurisprudence, and philosophy of sport.  At Princeton, he will be working on a book project that aims to advance both a general account of the architecture of artificial normative systems (such as law and games), and a parochial account of the grounds or determinants of the norms of American constitutional law.

Shaun Nichols is a professor at the University of Arizona.  His research focuses on the psychological underpinnings of ordinary thinking about philosophical issues. Nichols’ research has been funded by the National Institute of Health, the Templeton Foundation, and the Office of Naval Research, and is a winner of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology’s Stanton Prize for excellence in interdisciplinary research.  He is 2017 President of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology. He is the author of Mindreading (with Stephen Stich, Oxford, 2003), Sentimental Rules (Oxford, 2004), Bound (Oxford, 2015) as well as 100 articles in academic journals and volumes.

Andrew Schroeder is an associate professor of philosophy at Claremont McKenna College.  His research and teaching cover a range of issues in ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of science, with a special focus on problems that lie at their intersection.  His recent articles have appeared in Philosophy of Science, Philosophical Studies, Public Health Ethics, the Journal of Moral Philosophy, and the British Journal for Philosophy of Science.  At Princeton, he will be completing a short book on disability and well-being, as well as working on the ethics of presenting complex scientific information.  He will explore, for example, what ethical principles should guide scientists when choosing between alternative statistical representations of the same data?  To what extent should scientists tailor the presentation of their results to reflect ethical and political values, such as an aversion to inequality or norms of personal responsibility?

Amy Sepinwall is James G. Campbell, Jr. Assistant Professor in the Department of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at Wharton, University of Pennsylvania. She received her B.A. with First Class Honors from McGill University, where she also earned a Master’s degree in Bioethics. She holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Georgetown. She has two main research streams, one interrogating the notion of corporate constitutional rights and the other calling for an expansion of the conceptions of responsibility standardly advanced in law and ethics. At Princeton, she will be seeking to trace and critique notions of “taint,” or complicity, across different areas of law.

Murray Smith is Professor of Film and co-director of the Aesthetics Research Centre at the University of Kent, and President of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image. He has published widely on film, art, and aesthetics. His publications include Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (Oxford); Trainspotting (BFI); Film Theory and Philosophy (co-edited with Richard Allen) (Oxford); and the recently published Film, Art, and the Third Culture: A Naturalized Aesthetics of Film (Oxford). At Princeton he will be working on 'Film and the Aesthetic Dimension,' a project concerned with the types of value - aesthetic, epistemic, moral, political, cultural - embodied by films, and the interrelations among them.

Inés Valdez is assistant professor of political science at Ohio State University. Her work examines the problem of racial, gender, and religious difference in political theory, with a particular focus on the theorization of migration and cosmopolitanism. Her work has appeared in the American Political Science Review, Political Research Quarterly, and Political Studies, among other outlets. While at Princeton, she will work on her manuscript: Kant, Du Bois, and Cosmopolitanism in a New Color and a series of articles on the political theory of migration. 

Mark van Roojen is a professor of philosophy at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.  He works mostly in metaethics, ethics, and political philosophy.  He has published papers about moral rationalism, expressivism, moral semantics, moral epistemology, satisficing, and moral psychology.  He is the author of Metaethics: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge, 2015) and is presently book review editor for Ethics.  While at Princeton he will work on a book project defending moral rationalism.