Announcing the 2017-18 Edmond J. Safra Fellows-in-Residence

March 24, 2017

The Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University is excited to announce our Fellows-in-Residence for the 2017-18 academic year.

In 2017-18, the Center continues its partnership with the Berggruen Institute's Philosophy and Culture Center, whose goal is "to develop fresh ideas through comparative and interdisciplinary work and to relate these insights to the pressing issues of our day." Berggruen Fellows engage in scholarship of broad social and political importance from cross-cultural perspectives, and demonstrate a commitment to the public dissemination of their ideas. In the second year, we will host three Berggruen Fellows: Liz Fouksman, Jennifer London, and Andrew March.

Please find the full list of 2017-18 Fellows below:

Edmond J. Safra Fellows-in-Residence

Chiara Cordelli is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago in the Department of Political Science and at the College. She earned a PhD in political theory from the University College London in 2011, and was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University from 2011 to 2013. Her main areas of research are political and moral philosophy, with a particular focus on theories of justice, egalitarianism, normative defenses of the state, the public/private distinction, and the ethics of philanthropy and assistance. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of Political Philosophy, Journal of Politics, Political Theory, Political Studies, British Journal of Political Science, Critical Review of Social and Political Philosophy, and Political Studies Review, as well as in several edited volumes.  She is the co-editor of Philanthropy in Democratic Societies (University of Chicago Press, 2017). At the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics she will work on a book project, provisionally entitled Privatizing Justice, which provides a non-instrumental account of the ethical limits of privatization and develops principles of justice and legitimacy for contexts where both the funding and the provision of justice-required goods are increasingly privatized.

Liz Fouksman received her doctorate in International Development from the University of Oxford in 2015, where she was a Rhodes Scholar. Before coming to the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Liz spent two years as a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Research and Social Justice at the Society, Work and Development Institute, based at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Liz’s past research topics have ranged from the spread of environmental ideas in communities and nonprofits in East Africa and Central Asia, to child labor practices in South Indian folk opera troupes, to the views of 19th-century Russian orientalists traveling in colonial India and Burma. The connecting thread is an abiding fascination with the ways in which norms and worldviews travel and take hold in different parts of the globe, reshaping societies, cultures and political economies in their wake. Liz’s current project examines our moral, social and cultural attachment to wage labor, and the impediment such attachment poses for new imaginaries of the future of work and distribution in an increasingly automated world. In particular, Liz is investigating the ways unemployed welfare recipients in southern Africa link time-use, work, and income. Her research asks how such links challenge futurist calls for the decommodification of labor via mechanisms such as a universal basic income guarantee and/or shorter working hours. During her fellowship year, Liz plans to extend and shape this project into a series of articles and a book. Liz Fouksman is a Berggruen Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.

Manon Garcia will receive her PhD in Philosophy from the Université Paris 1-Panthéon Sorbonne in July 2017. A former student from the École normale supérieure, she also holds a master’s degree in Economics and Public Policy from Sciences Po and Polytechnique, during which course of study she worked on feminist economics. Her areas of research include feminist philosophy, the philosophy of economics, and sociopolitical philosophy. Her dissertation analyzed the problem of consent to submission in the light of gender difference. During her fellowship year, Manon Garcia will further develop her research in the field of feminist political philosophy of economics.

Clarissa Rile Hayward is a contemporary political theorist whose work focuses on theories of power, democratic theory, theories of identity, and American urban politics. She is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Washington University and Affiliate Faculty in Washington University’s Department of Philosophy and Programs in American Culture Studies and Urban Studies. She received her BA in Politics from Princeton University and her PhD in Political Science from Yale University. Her most recent book, How Americans Make Race: Stories, Institutions, Spaces (Cambridge University Press, 2013), was the co-winner of the American Political Science Association's prize for the Best Book in Urban Politics. Hayward is also author of De-Facing Power (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and co-editor (with Todd Swanstrom) of Justice and the American Metropolis (University of Minnesota Press, 2011). In addition, she has published many articles in edited volumes and in journals, such as the American Political Science Review, Constellations, Contemporary Political Theory, the Journal of Politics, Polity, and Political Theory. She has also published in popular publications, including Jacobin, the Washington Post's "Monkey Cage" blog, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Previously, Hayward's research has been supported by the National Academy of Education, the Spencer Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. During her fellowship year, Hayward will work on the question of how best to dismantle unjust power relations that are structural in form.

Brendan de Kenessey will receive his PhD in Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Spring 2017 before joining the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics as a Postdoctoral Fellow-in-Residence. He works in moral philosophy. De Kenessey's research aims to show how we can illuminate a wide range of moral phenomena by appreciating the pervasive role that the activity of joint decision-making (or joint practical deliberation, as he calls it) plays in our social interactions. His dissertation argues that several speech acts that have the power to change our moral obligations - promises, offers, commands, requests, and consent - are all best understood as moves within the activity of joint practical deliberation. While at the Safra Center, de Kenessey plans to develop and extend this theoretical framework, with a particular focus on exploring its applications to topics in political philosophy.

Michelle Ann Kweder received her PhD in Business Administration, Organizations and Social Change from the University of Massachusetts at Boston in 2015.  She has 25 years of experience working for social justice as a nonprofit leader, public sector worker, consultant, researcher, and activist. Kweder has taught classes focused on organizational behavior and leadership at Simmons College in the College of Arts and Sciences and the School of Management, where she is an Affiliate at the Center for Gender in Organizations. Before coming to the Center, she held a term position as the Administrative Director of the Harvard Prison Legal Assistance Project at Harvard Law School.  As a critical management scholar, Kweder will use the fellowship year to examine prisons as organizations.

Jennifer London is a political theorist who focuses on the history of Western and Near Eastern political thought. Her upcoming book, tentatively titled Fighting for Inclusion in Autocracy, analyzes the earliest writings of Arabic prose and political theory. It documents how non-Arab Muslim secretaries crafted Islamic thought to represent their identities and thereby expanded the contours of their Islamic public spheres. During her fellowship year, London will widen her view to a global study of the history of equilibrium and its ethical foundations by comparing both the hierarchical structures of human relationships that appear across the relevant sources and the normative systems that legitimize those hierarchical structures across varied traditions. Such work is intended as an exemplary exercise in a combined study of global political theory and ethics that attends to historical contingency and the advantages of using diverse media. This book will suggest that it is high time for political theorists, who have spent decades focused on democracy and its history, to attend to the varied histories of autocratic thought, since much of the world does not live in democracy. London has taught political theory at Columbia University, Tufts University, and the University of Chicago. Her articles have recently appeared in the Annual Review of Political Science, History of Political Thought, and in an edited volume, Comparative Political Theory in Space and Time. London holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago. She was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Tufts University and is a Faculty Fellow for the Association of Analytic Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies. Jennifer London is a Berggruen Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.

Andrew F. March taught for ten years in the Political Science Department at Yale University, and has taught Islamic Law at Yale and NYU law schools. His research and teaching interests are in the areas of political philosophy, Islamic law and political thought, religion, and political theory. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Marshall Scholar. His book, Islam and Liberal Citizenship (Oxford University Press, 2009), is an exploration of the Islamic juridical discourse on the rights, loyalties, and obligations of Muslim minorities in liberal polities, and won the 2009 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion from the American Academy of Religion. He has published articles on religion, liberalism, and Islamic law in, amongst other publications, the American Political Science Review, Philosophy & Public Affairs, Journal of Political Philosophy, European Journal of International Law, and Islamic Law and Society. During his fellowship year, he will be working on a book on the problem of divine and popular sovereignty in modern Islamic thought, titled The Caliphate of Man. Andrew F. March is a Berggruen Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.

Åsbjørn Melkevik received his PhD from Queen’s University at Kingston in 2017. His research focuses on social justice within market capitalist societies, arguing that if a necessary link exists between classical liberalism and the moral and institutional dimensions of the rule of law, then classical liberalism is bound to adopt a substantial egalitarian program. He has published his research in journals such as Business Ethics Quarterly, Constitutional Political Economy, and the European Journal of Political Theory. During his fellowship year, Åsbjørn will examine the possibility of ameliorating the ethical character of market capitalism following the early Chicago school of economics.

Julie L. Rose received her PhD from Princeton University in 2012, and is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College. Prior to her position at Dartmouth, Rose was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Brown University’s Political Theory Project and a Postdoctoral Fellow with Stanford University’s Center for Ethics in Society. Her primary area of research and teaching is contemporary political philosophy, with a focus on issues of economic justice. In her recent book Free Time (Princeton University Press, 2016), Rose argues that all citizens are entitled to, in the words of early labor reformers, time “for what we will.” Rose’s work has been published in Journal of Political Philosophy and Political Studies, and her current research examines the ethics of economic growth.

Ari Schick received a PhD in Philosophy from Michigan State University in 2014. His recent research has focused on speculative bioethics and the governance of emerging technologies. Prior to joining the Center, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Tel Aviv University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics in its Program on Science, Ethics, and Democracy. During his fellowship year, Schick will be working on articles that explore the relationship between justice, agency, and shared cultural imaginaries. Ari Schick is a Tel Aviv University Exchange Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.

Brandon M. Terry is Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and Social Studies at Harvard University and a Faculty Affiliate of American Studies, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and the Center for History and Economics. He earned a PhD with distinction in Political Science and African American Studies from Yale University, an MSc in Political Theory Research as a Michael von Clemm Fellow at Corpus Christi College at the University of Oxford, and an AB, magna cum laude, in Government and African and African American Studies from Harvard College. He has received fellowships and awards from the Center for History and Economics at Harvard, the Ford Foundation, the Mellon-Mays Foundation, the American Political Science Association, the National Conference of Black Political Scientists, and Best American Essays (2016). His first book manuscript, The Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement, is a reconstruction of the philosophical foundations of historiographical debates concerning the African-American civil rights movement, and an attempt, through a synthesis of methods drawn from political theory, philosophy of history, literary theory, and African-American Studies, to articulate the normative significance and political import of different narrative modes in African American history. Brandon also edited, with Tommie Shelby, a collection of essays on the political philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr., forthcoming in 2018. During his fellowship year, Brandon will be working on a second manuscript about the problem of crime in African American political thought, a series of essays on contemporary issues of race and politics in the United States, and a long-term research project on political and social thought in the Black Power Movement.

The Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, established in 1986, is one of Harvard University's interfaculty initiatives under the auspices of the Provost's Office. It encourages teaching and research about ethical issues in public life and the professions, and helps meet the growing need for teachers and scholars who address questions of moral choice in practical ethics and in areas such as architecture, business, education, government, journalism, law, medicine, public health and public policy. In addition to the fellowships, the Center sponsors a public lecture series on applied and professional ethics and other events throughout the year.