Announcing the Edmond J. Safra Fellows for the 2016-17 academic year.

March 31, 2016

Cambridge, MA - The Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University is excited to announce our Fellows-in-Residence, Graduate Fellows, and Undergraduate Fellows for the 2016-17 academic year.

In 2016-17, the Center will inaugurate a 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 first year, we will host three Berggruen Fellows: Tongdong Bai, Sungmoon Kim, and Samuel Moyn.

Please find the full list of 2016-17 Fellows below:

Edmond J. Safra Fellows-in-Residence

Gabrielle Adams is Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School. Her research focuses on responses to interpersonal transgressions, aiming to understand what drives the motivation to punish, compensate victims, apologize, and forgive. She is also interested in prosocial behavior and charitable donations. She holds a PhD in Organizational Behavior from Stanford University's Graduate School of Business and a BA from Colby College. Her dissertation received an award from Duke University's Center on Leadership and Ethics, and she has also been recognized as one of the '40 Best Business School Professors under 40' by Poets and Quants. During the fellowship year, Adams will study differences between victims' and transgressors' views of forgiveness and other responses to wrongdoing, particularly in an attempt to understand how these divergent perspectives create barriers to conflict resolution.
 
Tongdong Bai is the Dongfang Chair Professor of Philosophy at Fudan University in China. His research interests include Chinese philosophy and political philosophy, especially the comparative and contemporary relevance of traditional Chinese political philosophy. His book, A New Mission of an Old State: the Comparative and Contemporary Relevance of Classical Confucian Political Philosophy (in Chinese) was published by Peking University Press in 2009, and his book, China: The Political Philosophy of the Middle Kingdom (in English), was published by Zed Books in 2012. Bai is the director of an English-based MA, Visiting Student, and Auditing program in Chinese philosophy that is intended to promote the studies of Chinese philosophy in the world. He delivers lectures, in Chinese and English, in different venues, and is also involved in other social activities and organizations, all of which aim to promote new political norms that draw their resources from traditional Chinese philosophy and are informed by comparative philosophy and political theories. During the fellowship year, Bai will work on an English and drastically revised version of his 2009 book, which will explore Confucianism-inspired alternatives to liberal democracy in both domestic and global governance. Professor Bai is a Berggruen Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.
 
Joyce Dehli is a longtime journalist who, as a senior news executive, helped lead a major newspaper company's journalists through the past decade of great upheaval and innovation. She left her position as vice president for news at Lee Enterprises last year to return to writing. She has served on the Pulitzer Prize Board since 2008. She was an Ethics Fellow at the Poynter Institute, a global leader in training for professional journalists. Ethical decision-making in journalism and its consequences for democracy and social justice have been central interests in her career as a reporter, editor, and news executive. During the fellowship year, Dehli will explore the ways in which stories and storytelling, across fiction and nonfiction genres, influence how people emerge into both individuals and participants in a democracy and whether they see themselves as insiders or outsiders.
 
Sungmoon Kim is Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Public Policy at City University of Hong Kong and currently Associate Director of the Center for East Asian and Comparative Philosophy at City U. He holds a PhD in political science from the University of Maryland at College Park. His research interests include comparative political theory (Western and East Asian), Confucian democratic theory, and the history of East Asian political thought. Kim is the author of two books, Confucian Democracy in East Asia: Theory and Practice and Public Reason Confucianism: Democratic Perfectionism and Constitutionalism in East Asia, both published by Cambridge University Press. He has published his research in journals such as the American Political Science Review, British Journal of Political Science, Contemporary Political Theory, History of Political Thought, and The Review of Politics, among others. During the fellowship year, Kim will work on a new book manuscript provisionally titled "Democracy after Virtue: Philosophical Challenges for Confucian democratic theory," which explores a robust normative Confucian democratic theory plausible in a pluralist society. Professor Kim is a Berggruen Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.
 
Rachel McKinney received her PhD in Philosophy from the City University of New York Graduate Center in 2015. Her areas of research include philosophy of language, feminist philosophy, and social/political philosophy. Before coming to the Center, she was a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During the fellowship year, McKinney will be working on a series of articles on communication under conditions of uncertainty, threat, and antagonism.
 
Samuel Moyn is Professor of Law and History at Harvard University, where he has taught for two years. Before, he taught for thirteen years at Columbia University in New York, where he was most recently James Bryce Professor of European Legal History. His scholarship concerns modern European intellectual history and human rights history, and his project at the Center charts the relationship between human rights and distributive justice more generally from World War II to the present. Professor Moyn is a Berggruen Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.
 
Stephen Soldz is Professor at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. He is also part-time faculty in the mental health counseling program at Boston College. Soldz is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst with a specialization in research methodologies. For the last decade he has been a leader in a movement to remove psychologists from sometimes abusive national security interrogations and to change the American Psychological Association's (APA) permissive policies allowing that involvement. These efforts bore fruit last year when a report commissioned by the APA (Hoffman Report) documented extensive collusion between the APA and the Defense Department, leading the APA to vote to remove psychologists from national security interrogations. The Defense Department followed suit and withdrew psychologists from any involvement in detainee relations at Guantánamo. As part of this effort he wrote or coauthored over 100 articles, journal papers, and book chapters and was interviewed by press from around the world. Soldz was a lead author of last year's "All the President's Psychologists: The American Psychological Association's Secret Complicity with the White House and US Intelligence Community in Support of the CIA's 'Enhanced' Interrogation Program," featured on the front page of the May 1 The New York Times. His work has expanded beyond interrogations to encompass ethical issues raised by other forms of psychologist involvement in military and intelligence operations, an area known as "operational psychology." During the fellowship year, Soldz will reflect upon lessons learned over the last decade of struggle and work on the ethics of operational psychology, contextualizing those ethical issues in a real-world understanding of the broader influences affecting military and intelligence activities.
 
Winston C. Thompson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Education and Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Philosophy at the University of New Hampshire. He received his PhD in Philosophy of Education from Teachers College, Columbia University. Thompson's scholarship focuses upon ethical and social/political questions of justice, education, and the public good, with recent efforts analyzing dilemmas of educational policy. During the fellowship year, Thompson will work on his monograph project, "Justice in the Balance: Revitalizing Politics and Education." This work takes the mainstream view of the relationship between education and politics to: 1) cheapen our sense of justice in education, and 2) imperil our understanding of the political essence of justice in public life. By enlarging the mainstream view of the range in this relationship and asking what is owed to persons and polities as a matter of educational rather than political justice, this project explores a renewed approach to the very core of democracy within pluralistic societies.
 
Christopher Winship is the Diker-Tishman Professor of Sociology at Harvard University and a member of the senior faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is affiliated with Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science, the Program in Criminal Justice and the Center for Public Leadership. He holds a BA in sociology and mathematics from Dartmouth College and a PhD in sociology from Harvard. He is currently doing research on several topics: statistical models for causal analysis; the effects of education on mental ability; how people act when rationality is not a possibility; the linkage in Pragmatism between action and knowledge; analysis of Age-Period-Cohort models; inner city youth behavior and violence. With Steve Morgan he is the author of Counterfactuals and Causal Inference: Methods and Principles for Social Research, now in its 2nd edition. He is currently teaching and developing a new undergraduate course, Just Institutions and Moral Communities. During the fellowship year, Winship will be working on an evaluation of community-police relations in Boston.

Edmond J. Safra Graduate Fellows in Ethics

Roni Bar is a PhD candidate in the Porter School of Environmental Studies and the Department of Geography and Human Environment at Tel Aviv University. She was a Research Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics and a researcher in the Laboratory for Contemporary Urban Design, both at Tel Aviv University. Bar has a background in architecture and urban planning, with an emphasis on urban regeneration, neighborhood planning and city-industry dynamics. She has co-authored policy papers and two books: City-Industry (2014) and Neighborhood-State (2012). Bar is particularly interested in the way urban planning engages with the unknown and the unexpected--and in the dilemmas that arise when the unknown future is also a contested one. During the fellowship year, Bar will examine urban planning under conditions of ongoing uncertainty and chronic risk, focusing on the city of Jerusalem. Bar is the Israeli exchange scholar in 2016-17.
 
Kelsey Berry (Eugene P. Beard Fellow) is a PhD candidate in Health Policy, concentrating in Ethics. Her primary interest is justice and health resource allocation. Her dissertation will consider the role of vulnerability in the allocation of health resources, where vulnerability is defined as poor integration of a person or group into the institutional or relational features of a society. She is also broadly interested in tensions between partiality and fairness, and the personal and political. At Harvard, Berry has served as a teaching fellow in graduate courses in public health ethics and health policy, and has been supported by the National Institute of Mental Health to carry out empirical research in mental health policy. She holds a BA in Political Philosophy and Neuroscience from Princeton University.
 
Brandon Bloch is a PhD candidate in Modern European History. Specializing in twentieth-century intellectual history, his research interests encompass political, legal, and religious thought, as well as the role of intellectuals in democratic breakdown and reconstruction. His dissertation examines the contributions of Protestant intellectuals, both theologians and lay political and social theorists, to debates in Nazi and postwar Germany surrounding the sources and foundations of law and individual rights. He is especially interested in the efforts of Protestant church leaders, jurists, and politicians to shape the constitutional structure of the post-1945 West German state in light of the ethical vocabulary and political ideas developed within the religious opposition to Nazism. In 2015-16, Bloch was a fellow of the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. Before beginning graduate studies, he served as a research fellow in contemporary Holocaust education at the American Jewish Committee Berlin. He holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and an AM from Harvard.
 
Austin Campbell is a PhD candidate in Religion. At intersections of ethics and aesthetics, his research concerns itself with everyday questions about how to craft a good life. Before beginning doctoral studies (and for a long while during them), he worked as an interfaith chaplain in oncology and cardiology at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Tufts Medical Center in Boston. From this experience emerged the particular questions that occupy his dissertation: How ought we to face our mortality? What would constitute an attitudinal excellence toward one's own death, and how may it be cultivated? Provisionally titled Consolation's Afterlife, the project develops an interdisciplinary exploration through modern philosophy, theology, psychoanalytic theory, and poetry. Once finished, Campbell will be a two-time graduate from Harvard--having also earned a master's degree from the Divinity School, where he was a Presidential Scholar.
 
Myisha Cherry is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research interest lies at the intersection of moral psychology and social and political philosophy. Her dissertation looks at the rhetoric of forgiveness aimed at black victims of anti-black racism and attempts to provide an account of forgiveness that makes anger and forgiveness compatible. Cherry is a former faculty associate at John Jay College Institute for Criminal Justice Ethics. She is also a former lecturer at the City University of New York, St. Johns University, and Long Island University, where she taught courses in moral philosophy and ethics and law. She has written publicly about political emotions and justice for the Los Angeles Times, Salon, and Huffington Post and is currently co-editing The Moral Psychology of Anger, under contract with Rowman and Littlefield. She holds a BA in philosophy from Morgan State University and a Masters of Divinity from Howard University. In 2016-17, Cherry is a Visiting Edmond J. Safra Graduate Fellow in Ethics and a Santayana Fellow in the Harvard Department of Philosophy.  
 
Jacob Fay is a doctoral student and member of the Early Career Scholar Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His research focuses on the ethics of education policy and practice, as well as contemporary theories of injustice. He has served as the co-chair of the board of the Harvard Educational Review and was a member of the Spencer Foundation's Philosophy of Education Institute. Prior to his doctoral studies, he taught eighth-grade history at the Dwight-Englewood School in New Jersey. Fay holds an AB in history from Princeton University, an MA in American history from Brandeis University, an EdM from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and is a proud graduate of the Shady Hill Teacher Training Course.
 
Barbara Kiviat is a PhD candidate in Sociology and Social Policy. Her research sits at the intersection of economic sociology, stratification, and public policy. Her dissertation explores the moral underpinnings of the big data economy, asking what we must believe to be morally at ease with using information about a person's past to algorithmically predict future behavior and allocate resources accordingly. Kiviat is a doctoral fellow in the Kennedy School's Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality & Social Policy, and her research has been supported by the Center for American Political Studies and the Tobin Project. She holds a BA in The Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins University, an MA in business journalism from Columbia University, and an MPA from New York University, where she was a David Bohnett Public Service Fellow in New York City's Office of the Mayor. Previously, Kiviat was a staff writer at Time magazine and also wrote for other outlets such as Fortune, Money, The Miami Herald, The Arizona Republic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Reuters, and TheAtlantic.com.
 
Michael Rabenberg is a PhD candidate in Philosophy. His research focuses on ethics, personal identity, and their interface. His dissertation comprises three self-standing but interrelated essays, in which he seeks to answer three questions about death. First, how bad is death for the one who dies, and why it is as bad for the one who dies as it is? Second, are people rationally justified in caring greatly about not existing after they die, but not at all about the fact they did not exist before they came into existence? Third, is it the case that you may not kill one innocent person to prevent (say) two other innocent persons from being killed, but may kill one innocent person to prevent (say) 1 billion other innocent persons from being killed? At Harvard, Rabenberg has been the Philosophy Department Writing Fellow, a teaching fellow for undergraduate and graduate courses in ethics, political philosophy, and philosophy of religion, and a research assistant to an Edmond J. Safra Fellow-in-Residence. He holds an AB in Philosophy and English from Kenyon College.

Ronni Gura Sadovsky is a PhD candidate in Philosophy and member of Harvard's coordinated JD/PhD program. She is interested in the relationship between ignorance, irrationality, and oppression, and her research combines moral and political philosophy with epistemology. In her dissertation, Sadovsky examines the mores of interpersonal communication, focusing especially on novel and contested norms (such as the norm against "mansplaining"). She defends a conception of these innovations as tools for shifting power in epistemic exchanges, and she argues that they should be assessed according to their contribution to epistemic justice as well as their moral aptness. At Harvard, Sadovsky has served as a teaching fellow for Philosophy of Law, Race and Social Justice, Deductive Logic, and the Law School's Negotiation Workshop, and has independently taught a tutorial on discrimination. Sadovsky is a Fulbright Scholar. She holds a BA in philosophy and linguistics from Swarthmore College and a JD from Harvard Law School.

Edmond J. Safra Undergraduate Fellows in Ethics

The new Fellows join the current class of Edmond J. Safra Undergraduate Fellows, who are: Vivek Banerjee, Joshua Blecher-Cohen, Nicholas Bonstow, Zoë Hitzig, Madeline Hung, Nancy Ko, Garrett Lam, Fanelesibonge Mashwama, Priyanka Menon, Eva Shang, Jesse Shulman, Joy Wang, and Gene Young Chang.

Noah Delwiche is a junior in Mather House studying Philosophy. His academic interests include metaethics, the philosophy of religion, and classical rhetoric. Most recently, he has begun studying the art of spoken and written Latin after living in the Accademia Vivarium Novum in Rome last summer. Outside the classroom, Noah is the Associate Managing Editor of The Harvard Crimson and worked in an artisanal bakery in his hometown of Catonsville, Maryland during high school. He is also a research partner at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, working with a fellow on investigating voluntary servitude in the Roman and early modern European worlds.

Abigail Gabrieli is a junior concentrating in History and pursuing a secondary in Government. Her research interests lie in early modern European and American intellectual history, in the intersections between discourses of political and legal thought, epistemology, and gender and sexuality. She is also deeply interested in the ways in which producing historical scholarship can be an actively ethical force in the present. Beyond her academic work, she chairs the Institute of Politics' Policy program, staffs Contact Peer Counseling, and serves as a PCC for the History department.
 
Gabriel Karger is a sophomore concentrating in Social Studies. His normative interests include moral desert, compensation, culpability, and the usefulness of moral intuitions. When he isn't discussing thought experiments, Gabriel is often at Ultimate practice or at Harvard Hillel, where he is on the Steering Committee.

Jessica Levy is a sophomore with a joint concentration in Social Studies and Philosophy. She is interested in understanding and combating systemic injustice in political institutions. She explores her interest in government through her involvement with the Institute of Politics and the International Relations Council. She is the Director of International Relations Week, serves as an Assistant Director for Harvard Model United Nations, and will be traveling to Rome this spring to chair the Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural Committee at the World Model United Nations Conference. Jessica also swims on Harvard's club swim team, is an ambassador for the fellows at the Advanced Leadership Institute, and is the International Curriculum Coordinator for Harvard College Mentors for Urban Debate.

Phoebe Mesard is a sophomore concentrating in Social Studies. She is interested in inequality, both local and global, and its implications in public service and social justice. She also studies the postcolonial relationship between France and the Arab world. Outside the classroom, she works with Mission Hill After School Program, Boston's oldest student-run after school program, and Y2Y, the nation's first student-run homeless shelter for young adults, as well as various programs run through the Institute of Politics and International Relations Council.

Rohan Pavuluri is a sophomore studying statistics and computer science. He hopes to spend his time at Harvard and beyond exploring how governments can use data and technology to solve social, legal, and economic problems. Alongside his technical interests, he plans to examine how philosophical questions of privacy, responsibility, and decision theory apply to the public and private sector. Rohan has pursued his interests at the intersection of the public and private sectors through time with the Illinois Governor's Office, Chicago and Boston Public Schools, an empirical research team at Harvard Law School, a civic tech startup, and the Albright Stonebridge Group.
 
Justin Sanchez is a junior Neurobiology and MBB concentrator doing a secondary in Government. He is interested in problems at the intersection of neuroscience and philosophy of mind like free will and consciousness, as well as topics in philosophy of religion. He hopes to do work that explores the dialogue between neuroscience, ethical reasoning, and policymaking.
 
Bo Seo is a junior concentrating in Social Studies. He is interested in the philosophy of human rights and in its practice in law and politics. He is forever trying to marry these pursuits with his other great love, literature. Bo has held positions with the Human Rights Commission in his home, Australia, with a former Australian Prime Minister and a former Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. He debates for the Harvard Debate Union and volunteers with Harvard Human Rights in North Korea. He has a black belt in Tae-Kwon Do, a skill that, on the streets of Cambridge, he uses infrequently.

Susan Wang is a junior concentrating in Social Studies with a secondary in Statistics. Her work focuses on the ethics of soft paternalism and legislative nudging in America, and how those questions tie into deeper issues of freedom and societal responsibility. She is also interested in the development of the American political conscious, and how public opinion on controversial issues has shifted over time. Outside of class, she is the President of the Harvard College Democrats and a teaching assistant with the Math Department.
 
Thomas Westbrook is a sophomore concentrating in Philosophy, with a secondary in Classics and a citation in Classical Arabic. He is particularly interested in Kant's political and ethical philosophy, and in the use of ethics to explain the norms of practical life. Outside the classroom, he serves as an editor for The Harvard Crimson, the Harvard International Review, and Satire V. In his free time, he writes reviews of books, movies, and television.

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.