Princeton University Center for Human Values Annual Review 2024–25 by University Center for Human Values at Princeton University

2024 | 25

James A. Moffett

in Ethics Program in Ethics and Public Affairs

Political Philosophy Colloquium Forum for the History of Political Thought

Princeton Project in Philosophy and Religion

Program in Law and Normative Thinking

Future Values Initiative

Academic Freedom Initiative

UCHV Collaborative Projects

Co-sponsored Series, Events, and Conferences

UCHV Special

Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Professors for Distinguished Teaching

Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellows

UCHV Fellows in Law and Normative Thinking

Postdoctoral Research Associate in Cognitive Science of Morality

Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Cognitive Science of Values

Postdoctoral Research Associate in Ethics and Climate Change

Postdoctoral Research Associates in Philosophy and Religion

Postdoctoral Researcher in Moral Philosophy

Postdoctoral Researcher in Political Theory

Laurance S. Rockefeller Graduate Prize Fellows

Alan Patten, Director, University Center for Human Values; Howard Harrison and Gabrielle

Snyder Beck Professor of Politics

Letter from the Director

It has been a great honor this year to begin a term as director of the University Center for Human Values. Thanks to a generous gift by Laurance S. Rockefeller ’32, the Center opened its doors in 1990 and has been a vibrant and welcoming community for scholars and students of human values for the past 35 years.

Building on the efforts and achievements of my distinguished predecessors and the dedication and hard work of a tremendous staff and a committed faculty executive committee, my first year as director has been a gratifying one. It has been a pleasure to look for opportunities to stoke the fires of intellectually serious conversation and debate about a range of foundational and applied questions concerning ethics and human values. It has also been a privilege to look for ways to ensure that the Center remains a welcoming community that connects with disciplines and perspectives from across the University and beyond. And there have been thought-provoking strategic challenges concerning how to prepare the Center to reflect on questions and problems of human values for the next 35 years.

This has been a difficult year for higher education, and the Center has not been completely exempt from some of the most serious challenges. We had ambitious plans to hire several new senior faculty members, but these plans had to be paused this spring because of financial uncertainties affecting Princeton and other universities.

I am delighted to report, however, that the Center succeeded in making a junior faculty appointment, jointly with our friends in the Department of Religion. Toni Alimi joins the Center this fall as assistant professor of religion and human values. He is the author of an outstanding book, “Slaves of God: Augustine and Other Romans on Religion and Politics” (Princeton University Press, 2024). He is emerging as a leading expert on the intellectual history of slavery. Alimi’s scholarly interests and intellectual background nicely straddle several disciplines in which the Center is active, and we could not be more excited about his imminent arrival.

Another exciting new appointment is Pratap Mehta as a University lecturer. Mehta was a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching from 2021 to 2022 and in spring ’23, ’24, and ’25 terms. He now joins the Center on an ongoing basis with a new title and a new joint affiliation with the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. A decorated undergraduate teacher, much-loved graduate advisor, and former university administrator, Mehta is a scholar of comparative political theory, Indian politics and political thought, democratic political theory, and the history of modern political thought.

Despite the uncertainties and upheavals of the outside world in 2024 and 2025, the Center’s programs continue to flourish. A total of 46 students will be enrolled in the Center’s minor in Values and Public Life next year, the most

we have ever had in either the minor or the previous certificate program. These students come from 13 different majors. Starting this summer, we are financially supporting a number of these students who are doing service internships through the John H. Pace Jr ’39 Center for Civic Engagement, a significant new investment for the Center. I’m grateful to Sandra Berman for her leadership of our minor and for helping to establish this new collaboration with the Pace Center.

The Graduate Prize Fellowship (GPF) is one of our flagship programs, and it continued to prosper this year under acting director Edward Baring. Over the course of the year, 10 fellows from different departments met regularly to discuss work in progress related to human values. Baring also led a successful program for our seven postdocs, combining opportunities to present work in progress with practice job talks and professional development workshops. Our postdocs contributed impressively to the Center’s intellectual community this year, and we are glad that we can support emerging scholars at a time of uncertainty in the academic job market. While several of our postdocs are moving on to exciting new opportunities, we look forward to welcoming back several others this fall and the arrival of a small cohort of new postdocs.

The Laurance S. Rockefeller (LSR) Visiting Faculty Fellowship is another core program at UCHV, and it, too, had a successful year. The intellectual caliber of the LSR seminar was excellent, boosted

by the participation of an unprecedented four LSR Visiting Professors for Distinguished Teaching and by presentations by several Princeton faculty members from outside the Center. The incoming group of LSR fellows is very strong, evidence that the fellowship continues to be regarded as a top opportunity of its kind to spend time at a multidisciplinary ethics center.

The Center’s Program in Law and Normative Thinking (PLANT), directed by Kim Lane Scheppele, is in its second year of operation. PLANT hosted two fellows and several other academic visitors for the year and had regular Monday talks and seminars, partly targeted at doctoral students with Juris Doctor degrees intending to apply to law school jobs.

UCHV’s Research Film Studio, directed by Erika Kiss, had an exciting and successful year. On the heels of a prize-winning exhibition at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, Kiss exhibited again in 2024 (Art Biennale) and 2025 (Architecture Biennale). These exhibitions, housed at the European Cultural Center in Venice, showcased work by Princeton undergraduates who took courses with Kiss and continued working on group projects under her direction. The theme of the 2024 exhibition was a neglected tradition of African American filmmaking, while the 2025 exhibition includes several videos and displays that feature Princeton’s campus. These exhibitions are viewed by hundreds of thousands of visitors. In October 2024, a group of faculty from UCHV

and the Department of African American Studies joined about a dozen undergraduate contributors for a workshop in Venice.

Our other programs include the Forum for the History of Political Thought, the Academic Freedom Initiative, the Future Values Initiative, and the Princeton Project in Philosophy and Religion. These programs held a number of worthwhile lectures, workshops, salons, and conferences. In our regular UCHV events this year, highlights included the Tanner Lectures on Human Values by Randall Kennedy ’77 and a pair of James A. Moffett ’29 Lectures in Ethics by Bernard Harcourt ’84 and Alison McQueen. UCHV also co-sponsored and provided financial support to an unprecedented number of events and projects in other units this year.

Congratulations this spring to Molly Crockett, whose well-deserved promotion to full professor was approved by the Board of Trustees.

Congratulations to Erika Kiss as well for her promotion to senior lecturer. And a special note of thanks to Michael Smith, a long-serving

member of the Center’s executive committee and former acting director, who retires from Princeton this year. The Center has benefited for years from his dedication and wisdom.

The Center was delighted to welcome a new assistant director last fall, Derek Balcom. Balcom is still completing his first full annual cycle as our senior staff person, but it is not too early to thank him for his leadership this year and to praise him for being such a quick student of the Center’s complex financial and administrative structures. A warm thank you to all our amazing staff for making this such a smooth first year for me as director. Thank you Dawn Disette, Andrew Perhac, Kim Murray, Kim Girman, Tammy Hojeibane, Sam Hontz, and Julie Clack!

I am taking a long-awaited sabbatical leave during the 2025-26 academic year, but the Center will be in the experienced hands of Stephen Macedo, who will be acting director for the year. Macedo has been on the Center’s executive committee for over 25 years and served two terms as director from 2001 to 2009. Under Macedo’s leadership next year, the Center plans to offer a full menu of events and programs. Please come and check out what’s on at UCHV!

Alan Patten

Director, University Center for Human Values; Howard Harrison and Gabrielle Snyder Beck Professor of Politics

Faculty Accomplishments

Edward G. Baring

Associate Professor of History and Human Values; Acting Director, Early Career Research

Edward G. Baring gave talks at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Yale University and was the keynote speaker at the 5th Biennial Conference of the Network for Phenomenological Research in Okayama, Japan. He also discussed his work on the Institute of Intellectual History’s podcast “Lectures in Intellectual History.”

Andrew Chignell

Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Religion and the University Center for Human Values

Andrew Chignell served as tercentennial chair of the North American Kant Society through the end of 2024 and was elected to its board of trustees. In that capacity, he helped arrange a series of inperson and virtual events to honor Immanuel Kant on his 300th birthday and gave invited addresses at Kant-related events in Rome; Bonn, Germany; Bologna, Italy; and Seoul, Korea. He also co-organized the Virtual Kant Congress (VKC) with the help of Z Quanbeck (UCHV postdoctoral fellow) and a group of European scholars. The VKC featured 22 different national or regional groups discussing the ongoing significance of Kant’s philosophy in their part of the world. Chignell continued to revise and update his “Food Ethics” course for Princeton Online via Coursera, which has now been viewed by over 20,000 students. As a faculty steering committee

member for the Center for the Decentralization of Power Through Blockchain Technology (DeCenter), Chignell organized and participated in DeCenter panels on philosophical and ethical issues related to blockchain technology. With Lara Buchak, Chignell continued to direct the UCHV-sponsored Princeton Project in Philosophy and Religion (3PR). This past year, they received generous alumni donations that helped them develop 3PR in a more undergraduate direction. This included running a series of reading groups for undergraduates, sponsoring a Wintersession course on “How to Make Hard Choices: Philosophy and the Meaning of Life,” and offering their pilot course “Philosophy, Religion and Existential Commitments.” With support from UCHV and other campus entities, Chignell is serving as executive producer of a new stage play about the relationship between Trenton, New Jersey, and Princeton, New Jersey—one that will go up at the Passage Theater Company (Trenton) and then at the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Theatre, which is part of the McCarter Theatre Center (Princeton) in 2027.

Molly Crockett

Associate Professor of Psychology and the University Center for Human Values

Molly J. Crockett and Catherine CluneTaylor continued the Future Values Initiative at UCHV, hosting the Science and Social Justice Salon series and sponsoring the first cohort of the Future Values Initiative postdoctoral fellows. Crockett was awarded grants from the John Templeton Foundation and the National Science Foundation. Crockett delivered keynote addresses at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology and the Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency; gave seminars at Universität Tübingen, Yale University, and Princeton University; and co-organized the “Agency & Experience: Buddhist and Cognitive Perspectives” workshop. Crockett published papers in Science, Nature Communications, Nature Machine Intelligence, Current Directions in Psychological Science, and Cognition and an op-ed in The Guardian. For the 2025-26 academic year, Crockett will be a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

Graduate Prize Fellow Sayash Kapoor and Professor Molly Crockett

Erika Kiss

Director, University Center for Human Values Film Forum and Research Film Studio; Lecturer, Council of the Humanities, European Cultural Studies and Human Values

Erika A. Kiss directed the University Center for Human Values’ Research Film Studio, which received the Best Institutional Proposal Award for its “ArtHouse Memes” exhibition, inspired by an overlooked Afro-American arthouse tradition. “ArtHouse Memes” was displayed at the Venice Art Biennale in 2024. As the exhibition’s curator, designer, and contributor, Kiss developed a second edition of “ArtHouse Memes” for the Art Week University Bienniale in Mallorca. Kiss also curated, designed, and contributed to the Research Film Studio’s “Genius Loci” exhibition, on display at the 2025 Venice Biennale of Architecture. In addition to her Research Film Studio projects, Kiss gave a keynote speech at the University Art Bienniale in the prestigious Casal Balaguer Cultural Center. Her solo exhibition and video installation “Prince of Watts (Slaughterhouse Hamlet)” opened on June 5, 2025, at Fundación Barceló in Palma, Mallorca.

Melissa Lane Class of 1943 Professor of Politics

Melissa Lane was awarded the 2024 book prize of the Journal of the History of Philosophy for her 2023 monograph “Of Rule and Office: Plato’s Ideas of the Political” and was named to the editorial board of the American Political Science Review. While on sabbatical in the U.K. from 2024 to 2025, she delivered the Isaiah Berlin Lectures in the University of Oxford’s Faculty of Philosophy as part of the Isaiah Berlin Visiting Professorship and was a visiting fellow of Corpus Christi College Oxford, making her the only person ever to have delivered at the University of Oxford both the Carlyle Lectures and the Isaiah Berlin Lectures. She continued to serve as the Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College. Lane was an honorary visiting professor of philosophy at University College London (UCL) in spring 2025 and a visiting fellow of the Keeling Centre for Ancient Philosophy and the Institute of Classical Studies. Among other talks, she gave the Sheila Kassman Memorial Lecture at the Institute of Classical Studies; a Current Legal Problems lecture in the UCL Faculty of Laws; the 600th seminar of the University of Cambridge’s B Club in ancient philosophy; and the Winch Lectures at the University of St Andrews. She also served as a commentator on the 2025 Berkeley Tanner Lectures and made her 10th appearance on the BBC Radio 4 program “In Our Time.” In summer 2025, she will present invited papers at two of the most prestigious meetings in ancient philosophy: the Symposium Hellenisticum and the Entretiens sur l’Antiquité classique, hosted by the Fondation Hardt.

Stephen J. Macedo

Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics and the University Center for Human Values; Chair, Tanner Lectures on Human Values Committee

Stephen J. Macedo’s new book, “In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us,” was published in 2025 and has received extensive coverage in major media around the world. Macedo and co-author Frances Lee have appeared on CNN’s “The Lead With Jake Tapper,” the “PBS NewsHour,” dozens of major interview programs and podcasts in the U.S., the U.K., the Middle East, South Africa and elsewhere, including The New York Times’ “The Daily.” The book has been featured on Fareed Zakaria’s “GPS” podcast, and in reviews or articles in The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The Christian Science Monitor. Macedo and Lee wrote a subsequent forum essay for the Boston Review, with four critical commentaries and a reply. The book provides the first comprehensive political assessment of how our institutions fared under COVID-19 and argues that too many educated elites failed to live up to their deepest values of toleration and open-mindedness, a willingness to entertain doubts and uncertainties, and a respectful honesty toward the public. Macedo has given talks related to the book at the University of California-Berkeley, Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, Princeton University and elsewhere. Aside from his COVID-19 odyssey, Macedo spent nine days in China in October 2024 giving lectures at four universities on the upcoming U.S. presidential election. He has also participated in various workshops and conferences, including several on civic education initiatives at American universities.

Victoria McGeer

Senior Research Scholar, University Center for Human Values

McGeer gave a talk on “Apology and Trust” at the inaugural Positive Moral Philosophy Conference, which was held at Arizona State University in May 2025.

Left to right: Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee at the offices of WETA before filming a segment on their new book, “In Covid’s Wake”

Philip N. Pettit

Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of the University Center for Human Values

Kim Lane Scheppele

Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs and the University Center for Human Values; Director, Program in Law and Normative Thinking

Philip N. Pettit published “When Minds Converse: A Social Genealogy of the Human Soul” (Oxford University Press, 2025). This is based on the John Locke Lectures in philosophy that he gave at the University of Oxford in 2019. In the course of the year, he gave several significant presentations, including the keynote address to the Royal Society of New South Wales and Learned Academies Forum in 2024, the Agora Lecture Series at Brown University, and an Australian Academy of Law public lecture. He was also the Brocher speaker at the 2025 Brocher Summer Academy on Global Population Health in Hermance, Switzerland.

Kim Lane Scheppele was a founding contributor to a new publication called “The Contrarian,” which now has more than half a million subscribers on Substack. She made numerous appearances in top media outlets, including on PBS’ “NewsHour” and in an op-ed for The New York Times, “Are We Sleepwalking Into Autocracy?” with Norman Eisen. Scheppele also gave several invited lectures: “The Role of the Rule of Law in Recovering Democratic Government” at the 35th anniversary conference of the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe; the inaugural Sanford Levinson Lecture in Constitutional Studies, “Losing Faith in Constitutions?,” at the University of Texas at Austin; and the John M. Kelly Memorial Lecture at University College Dublin, “Democracy in Danger: The Global Challenge of Autocratic Legalism.”

Deepening Understanding

2024 Tanner Lecturer Randall L. Kennedy and commentators share a laugh.

Deepening Understanding

Tanner Lectures on Human Values

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values are presented annually at a select list of universities worldwide. The University Center for Human Values serves as host to these lectures at Princeton, in which an eminent scholar from philosophy, religion, the humanities, sciences, creative arts, or learned professions, or a person eminent in political or social life, is invited to present a series of lectures reflecting upon scholarly and scientific learning related to “the entire range of values pertinent to the human condition.”

November 14-15, 2024

Randall L. Kennedy, the Michael R. Klein Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, delivered the 2024 Tanner Lectures on “In Praise of Racial Liberalism,” which posited the ends and means suitable currently for advancing the cause of racial justice in America.

Kennedy’s first lecture, “What Does Racial Justice Mean Today?,” outlined and defended his vision of racial liberalism. His second lecture, “In Praise of Racial Liberalism: How Can We Achieve It?,” considered how racial liberalism might be better realized today.

Commentators:

Elizabeth Anderson

John Dewey Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, University of Michigan

Elizabeth Hinton

Professor of History, African American Studies & Law, Yale University

Sanford V. Levinson

W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood, Jr.

Centennial Chair in Law Professor, The University of Texas at Austin School of Law

Olúfémi O. Táíwò

Associate Professor of Philosophy, Georgetown University

Top: Commentator Elizabeth Hinton at the 2024 Tanner Lectures.

Left: Stephen Macedo, chair of the Tanner Lectures, introduces Randall L. Kennedy at the 2024 Tanner Lectures.

James A. Moffett ’29 Lectures in Ethics

The Moffett Lecture Series aims to foster reflection about moral issues in public life, broadly construed, at either a theoretical or a practical level, and in the history of thought about these issues. The series is made possible by a gift from the Whitehall Foundation in honor of James A. Moffett ’29.

September 19, 2024

Bernard E. Harcourt , the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and professor of political science at Columbia University, delivered the fall 2024 James A. Moffett ’29 Lecture in Ethics. Titled “J’Accuse: A Critical Theory of Radical Legal Praxis,” Harcourt elaborated on a new model for political and legal intervention that would not be merely defensive in orientation but could also be effective offensively.

March 20, 2025

Alison McQueen, associate professor of political science and (by courtesy) history at Stanford University, delivered the spring 2025 James A. Moffett ’29 Lecture in Ethics. In her lecture “Better to Be a Traitor? Hobbes on Betrayal,” McQueen examined the concept of treason in Thomas Hobbes’ (1588-1679) political thought, focusing on his provocative stance that there is no moral difference between traitors and enemies.

Top: Bernard E. Harcourt delivers the fall 2024 Moffett Lecture.

Bottom: Alison McQueen delivers the spring 2025 Moffett Lecture.

Program in Ethics and Public Affairs

The Program in Ethics and Public Affairs (PEPA) advances the study of the moral purposes and foundations of institutions and practices, both domestic and international. PEPA seminars seek to bring the perspectives of moral and political philosophy to bear on significant issues in public affairs.

Fall 2024

SEPTEMBER 12

“Structural Logics of Presidential Disqualification”

Aziz Huq , The University of Chicago Law School

NOVEMBER 21

“Grim Fascination: The Ethics of True Crime and Dark Tourism”

Erich Matthes, Wellesley College

DECEMBER 5

“Up From Feudalism: The Rise of Black American Liberal Tradition”

Keidrick Roy, Harvard University

Spring 2025

FEBRUARY 20

“How Race Makes a Difference”

Lily Hu, Yale University

MARCH 6

“Analytic Epistemology and Criminal Justice”

Sarah Moss, University of Michigan

APRIL 17

“Vulnerability, Care, Power, and Futurity:

Audre Lorde, June Jordan and the Process of Political Worldmaking”

Deva Woodly, Brown University

Political Philosophy Colloquium

The Political Philosophy Colloquium is cosponsored by the Department of Politics. It presents talks by scholars from Princeton and elsewhere on a broad range of topics related to the history of political thought, contemporary political philosophy, and related subjects.

Spring 2025

FEBRUARY 6

“The Political Theory of Venality in the Ancien Régime”

Daniel Luban, Columbia University

MARCH 27

“Loving Strangers”

Meghan Sullivan, University of Notre Dame

APRIL 10

“The Right to Stand as a Candidate and the Democratic Value of Elections”

Annabelle Lever, SciencesPo

APRIL 24

“The Garveyite Art of Eloquence”

Adom Getachew, The University of Chicago

MAY 1

“Students’ Rights as Partisan Smokescreen”

Rita Koganzon, University of Houston

Forum for the History of Political Thought

The Forum for the History of Political Thought provides a venue for Princeton students and faculty from different disciplines to discuss both substantive and methodological issues in the history of political thought and seeks to build bridges to comparative politics, comparative constitutional law, and area studies.

Fall 2024

SEPTEMBER 11

“Making Sense of History: Political Ethics and the Prospects of a Liberal Narrative in Hegel”

Karsten Fischer, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich

NOVEMBER 2–3

“Of Marble and Mines: The Politics of Architecture, Freedom, and Oppression in the Roman World”

Clifford Ando, The University of Chicago

Valentina Arena, University College London

Penelope Davies, University of Texas at Austin

Christopher Erdman, Washington University in St. Louis

Ashton Fancy, Princeton University

Gary Farney, Rutgers University

Rob Goodman, Toronto Metropolitan University

Michael Hawley, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Charles Ro, University of Pennsylvania

Mantha Zarmakoupi, University of Pennsylvania

Spring 2025

FEBRUARY 21

“The Structure of Academic Freedom”

Robert Post , Yale Law School (Jointly sponsored with the Academic Freedom Initiative)

FEBRUARY 22

“Racial Capitalism in the History of Political Thought”

Charisse Burden-Stelly, Wayne State University

Claudia Cervantes Perez , Princeton University

Ida Danewid, University of Sussex

Michael Gorup, New College of Florida

Tristan Hughes, Princeton University

Siddhant Issar, University of Louisville

Lucas Pinheiro, Bard College

Onur Ulas Ince, SOAS University of London

Inés Valdez , Johns Hopkins University

Ricardo Vega León, Rutgers University

FEBRUARY 26

Book Talk With Bruno Leipold: “Citizen Marx”

MARCH 29

“Workshop on Political Theory and Ethnography”

Yuna Blajer, Loyola University Chicago

Anna Closas, University of California-Berkeley

Patricia Fernández-Kelly, Princeton University

Onur Gunay, Princeton University

Matthew Longo, Leiden University

Jenny Mansbridge, Harvard Kennedy School

Jennifer Rubenstein, University of Virginia

Elaine Yim, Princeton University

Bernardo Zacka, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

APRIL 2

“How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps From Democracy to Fascism”

Ece Temelkuran in Conversation With Razia Iqbal

MAY 19

Film Screening of “E.1027 Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea” (2024) and Conversation

With Director Beatrice Minger on “Modernism, Misogyny, and Other Matters”

(Jointly sponsored with UCHV’s Film Forum)

Princeton Project in Philosophy and Religion

The Princeton Project in Philosophy and Religion (3PR) is an initiative of the Center in cooperation with Princeton’s Department of Philosophy and the Department of Religion. 3PR brings together an interdisciplinary group of students and scholars who share a research interest in the philosophy of religion, broadly construed.

Recurring Events

3PR Work-in-Progress Group for Faculty and Graduate Students

Undergraduate Reading Groups

“C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien” (Parts I and II) “Islamic Philosophy, Theology, and Mysticism” “Liberation Theology”

Conferences and Workshops

OCTOBER 25-27, 2024

Conference on Reason and Revelation in 17th Century Philosophy

JANUARY 21-22, 2025

Wintersession workshop for undergraduates on “How to Make Big Choices: Philosophy, Careers, and Meaning”

MARCH 21-22, 2025

3PR Annual Conference on Existential Commitments and the Ethics of Belief

Program in Law and Normative Thinking

The Program in Law and Normative Thinking (PLANT) provides a home at Princeton for interdisciplinary research focused on law with an emphasis on the normative implications of legal rules, the actions of legal institutions, and the development of constitutionalism and the rule of law in the U.S. and worldwide. PLANT’s seminar series brings together law-related faculty and graduate students across campus to present academic papers, dissertation proposals, and dissertation chapters and receive feedback on the legal side of their work.

Events

Fall 2024

DECEMBER 3

Panel Discussion With Author Hendrik Hartog: “Nobody’s Boy and His Pals: The Story of Jack Robbins and the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic”

Panelists

Mitchell Duneier, Princeton University

Judith Resnik , Yale University

Paul Starr, Princeton University

Chaired by Kim Lane Scheppele, Princeton University

Spring 2025

JANUARY 28

The Justice John Marshall Harlan Lecture in Constitutional Adjudication “Democracy, Populism, and Institutional Resistance: Supreme Courts in the Game of Power”

The Honorable Luís Roberto Barroso, President of the Supreme Federal Court of Brazil

APRIL 21

“Main Justice” Podcast Live Taping and Audience Q&A with Andrew Weissmann ’80 and Mary McCord

MAY 5

Princeton Law-Engaged Faculty Discuss Their Research: The PLANT Retreat

Top: Luís Roberto Barroso, President of the Supreme Federal Court of Brazil, delivers the 2025 Harlan Lecture. Bottom: Andrew Weissmann, Kim Lane Scheppele, and Mary McCord at the live taping of the “Main Justice” podcast.

“The Expanding Toolbox for Accountability: Universal Jurisdiction and Open-source Investigations”

Deborah Amos, Ferris Professor of Journalism in Residence

“Beyond the Bench: Justice and Decision-making in U.S. Immigration Courts”

Amelia Frank-Vitale, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs

“The Legal and Political Development and Resilience of At-will Employment Policy”

Paul Frymer, Professor of Politics

“Caste Formalism: The Law and Politics of Equality in India (with Madhav Khosla)”

Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching

“Democracy in Danger: The Global Challenge of Autocratic Legalism”

Kim Lane Scheppele, Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs and the University Center for Human Values; Director, Program in Law and Normative Thinking

JUNE 20

“The Rule of Law in America: Executive Power

From Robert Jackson to Donald Trump” A Conversation With Andrew Weissmann ’80, New York University School of Law, and Kim Lane Scheppele, Princeton University, at Humboldt University of Berlin

Seminars

Fall 2024

SEPTEMBER 30

“‘The Real Preference of the Voters’: Achieving Neo-Madisonian Electoral Reform”

Edward B. Foley, Crane Fellow in Law and Public Policy

OCTOBER 7

“From Research to Search: Legal Research Technologies, 1964-1980”

Alex Reiss-Sorokin, Davis Center and Institute for Advanced Study Postdoctoral Fellow

NOVEMBER 4

“Vicarious Criminal Responsibility at the upreme Court and Nuremberg, 1946”

Sarah Seo ’02, *16, Columbia Law School

NOVEMBER 11

“Congressional Issue Spotting”

Samuel Simon, Graduate Student, Politics

Spring 2025

FEBRUARY 3

“Tort’s Origin Story”

Cristina Tilley, UCHV Fellow in Law and Normative Thinking

FEBRUARY 10

“Interest Groups in Democratic Administration”

Andrew Hahm, Graduate Student, Politics

FEBRUARY 17

“When International Law Regimes Clash: The European Union and International Arbitration”

George Bermann, Columbia Law School

MARCH 3

“The Syrian Revolution and the Future of International Peace Negotiations”

Zaid Al-Ali, Visiting Research Scholar, Princeton University

MARCH 17

“A Defender of Nazis: Robert Servatius, the State of Israel, and the Eichmann Trial”

Shachar Gannot , Graduate Student, History

MARCH 24

“Accountability for Colonial Wrongs in International Law: Mapping the Legal Terrain”

Phoebe Okowa, UCHV Fellow in Law and Normative Thinking

MARCH 31

“Lobbying Against Enforcement”

Reilly Steel, Graduate Student, Politics

APRIL 14

Professional Development Workshop “How to Teach Comparative Public/ Constitutional Law (and Theory)”

Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Laurance S.

Rockefeller Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching

Wojciech Sadurski, Laurance S. Rockefeller

Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching

Kim Lane Scheppele, Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs and the University Center for Human Values; Director, Program in Law and Normative Thinking

APRIL 28

“Motivated Reasoning”

Megan Wicks, Graduate Student, Philosophy

MAY 12

“Informal Constitutional Change and the Rise of Fiscal Discipline in Europe: The Ripple Effect on Fundamental Social Rights”

Maria Kotsoni, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Stanley J. Seeger ’52 Center for Hellenic Studies

Future Values Initiative

Leveraging Princeton’s strengths in the sciences and the humanities, UCHV’s Future Values Initiative supports scholarship that expands traditional approaches to normative inquiry and applied ethics of science and technology, critically examining present injustices by imagining and co-creating radically different futures. The initiative envisions new modes of scholarship where scientists are given tools to understand how values shape the production of science, how its benefits and costs are socially distributed, and where humanists are partners in the innovation process rather than critics after the fact.

Fall 2024

NOVEMBER 13

Future Values Fellows Lunch Seminar

“What Do We Mean When We Say Science Is ‘Objective’ or ‘Biased’? When and How Do Values and Ideals Influence the Practice of Science?”

DECEMBER 4

Future Values Fellows Lunch Seminar

“How Can Scientists Responsibly and Sensitively Consider Sex and Gender as Variables in Their Research?”

DECEMBER 9

Science and Social Justice Salon: A Discussion with Lydia X.Z. Brown and Kelsey Henry

Spring 2025

FEBRUARY 26

Future Values Fellows Lunch Seminar

“How Can Scientists Responsibly Explore the Genomic Effects of Race While Still Recognizing Race as Socially Constructed?”

Rina

Bliss, Rutgers University

APRIL 2

Future Values Fellows Lunch Seminar

“How Should Scientists Think About Ethical and Epistemic Risks Associated With Using Artificial Intelligence Tools in Their Research?”

APRIL 25

Science & Social Justice Salon: “More Everything Forever” With Author Adam Becker

The inaugural cohort of Future Values Fellows with co-directors Molly J. Crockett and Catherine Clune-Taylor.

Academic Freedom Initiative

The Academic Freedom Initiative organizes occasional events to probe the philosophical bases of academic freedom, study its history in different parts of the world, and hear from those who have been involved in concretely defending it.

FEBRUARY 21

“The Structure of Academic Freedom”

Robert Post , Yale Law School (Jointly sponsored with the Forum for the History of Political Thought)

UCHV Collaborative Projects

In the 2024–25 academic year, UCHV fostered collaborations with these campus communities, expanding and deepening ties that extend beyond sponsorship of events.

The Climate Futures Initiative in Science, Values and Policy (CFI) is an interdisciplinary research program at Princeton University, administered by the High Meadows Environmental Institute (HMEI) and cosponsored by HMEI and UCHV. The initiative explores normative and positive approaches to the future of humankind, especially as that future is affected by climate change. The initiative features a wide-ranging dialogue across disciplines and world regions, with considerable attention to ethics.

The Climate Mobilities Working Group is an interdisciplinary research group of scholars from a range of institutions who examine the ethics, justice, policies and science of climate displacement, immobility, and migration.

Law@Princeton explores the role of law in constituting politics, society, the economy, and culture. Each year, Princeton welcomes a select group of residential fellows and occasional visitors drawn from the academy, legal practice, government and policymaking institutions. They join a collection of professors on Princeton’s permanent faculty who draw upon diverse methodologies to investigate legal phenomena. By combining the multidisciplinary expertise of Princeton’s faculty with knowledge and perspectives provided by leading academic and practical experts on the law, Law@Princeton has created an exciting new forum for teaching and research about the legal technologies and institutions needed to address the complex problems of the 21st century.

Co-sponsored Series, Events, and Conferences

The organizing department is given in parentheses.

• 17th Annual Graduate Conference in Political Theory (Politics)

• Aesthetics Conference (Philosophy)

• “Amazonian Leapfrogging 3.0: Confronting Tipping Points and Exponentializing Naturebased Solutions” (PIIRS)

• “Being at Home in Princeton” (Art & Archaeology)

• “Bye Bye Tiberias” Film Screening and Talk With Lina Soualem (Near Eastern Studies)

• Charles Beitz Retirement Conference (Politics)

• Compass Conference (Philosophy)

• Conference on the Joe Biden Presidency (Center for the Study of Democratic Politics)

• “Exercise: Forming Bodies, Selves, Disciplines” (German)

• Fantasies of the People Conference (German)

• “Freedom and Obligation in the Seventeenth Century” (English)

• “Geoengineering in Crisis: The Princeton Workshop on Geoengineering Ethics and Governance” (High Meadows Environmental Institute)

• Gilbert S. Omenn M.D., Ph.D. ’61 and Martha A. Darling *70 Lecture in Ethics and Policy in Bioengineering (Omenn-Darling Bioengineering Institute)

• Harlem Walks Project (Religion/African American Studies)

• Human Rights Hub Initiative (Anthropology)

• “Images in Transition: Art and Politics in Chile’s Transition to Democracy” (Spanish and Portuguese)

• INCH: International Network for the Comparative Humanities (English)

• “Indelible Footprints in Spain and Beyond” (Spanish and Portuguese)

• Instruments of Obligations Conference (Anthropology)

• Minority and Philosophy Speaker Series (Philosophy)

• “Moving With María José Arjona” (Spanish and Portuguese)

• “Mysticism & Modernism: The World of Margarete Susman” (German)

• Political Epistemology and Oppression Workshop (Philosophy)

• Princeton Workshop in Normative Philosophy Series (Philosophy)

• Program in Classical Philosophy (Philosophy)

• “Race, Caste, and the Challenge of Karma: Cultivating Black Buddhist Perspectives” (Center for Culture, Society, and Religion)

• “Should Universities Engage in Politics? A Roundtable Discussion on Academic Freedom and Institutional Neutrality” (SPIA)

• “Siren Song: Understanding Pakistan Through Its Women Singers” (Gender and Sexuality Studies)

• “The Anti-Zionist Idea: History, Theory, and Politics” (Comparative Literature)

• “The Dilemmas of a ‘Socialist’ Empire: The USSR and Its Mission Civilisatrice” (PIIRS)

• “The Phoenix of Gaza: From Freedom Dreams to Falasteen Futures” Virtual Reality Exhibit and Symposium (African American Studies)

• “The Prehistoric Front of the Cold War: Soviet Debates on the Origins of Art and the Human” (Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies)

• The Sense Archive (English)

• Doctoral Symposium: Traffic (Architecture)

Special Events

Fall 2024

Book Talk With Jeffrey Green (University of Pennsylvania):

“Bob Dylan: Prophet Without God”

Organized by Alan Patten

Spring 2025

Book Talk With Bruno Leipold: “Citizen Marx”

Organized by Jan-Werner Müller

“New Work in Democratic Theory”

Organized by Daniel Wodak

Book Talk With Author Evan Mandery: “Poison Ivy: How Elite Colleges Divide Us”

Organized by Stephen Macedo

“Beyond Medical and Social Models of Disability: Current Controversies, Future Directions”

Organized by Sarah Purinton

Tongdong Bai (Fudan University): “Beyond Nation-state and Cosmopolitanism: A Confucian New Tian Xia Model of State Identity and Global Governance”

Organized by Rahul Sagar

“Workshop: What Is Comparative/What Is Global?”

Organized by Rahul Sagar

“Book Manuscript Workshop: ‘The Politics of Belief in Enlightenment Skepticism’”

Organized by Elena Zheng

Teaching and Learning

Eric Gregory speaks to VPL student Danielle Shapiro at the 2025 VPL Class Day

Teaching and Learning

Values and Public Life Program

Under the leadership of the Values and Public Life (VPL) Program Director Sandra Bermann, the Cotsen Professor in the Humanities and professor of comparative literature, the Class of 2025 marked a significant milestone as the first cohort to graduate with a minor in VPL, following its transition from a certificate program to an official undergraduate minor beginning in the 2024-2025 academic year. A total of 16 seniors, representing eight academic disciplines from across the University, successfully fulfilled the minor requirements, demonstrating academic excellence and deep engagement with the UCHV community .

In addition to completing the program’s academic requirements, students participated in numerous co-curricular activities this year. These included informal dinner discussions with the program’s director, offering the students the opportunity to discuss their experiences and professional aspirations in Princeton’s newly renovated Prospect House. VPL also hosted a fall reception and spring open house, which gave current and prospective students an opportunity to engage in meaningful dialogue with UCHV’s postdoctoral research associates, visiting scholars, and faculty.

As in previous years, VPL students participated in a mentorship program that paired undergraduates with UCHV’s Laurance S. Rockefeller Graduate Prize Fellows. Matches were made based on shared disciplinary interests and research trajectories, providing students and fellows the opportunity to connect and explore areas of academic focus and professional development.

Throughout their senior year, VPL students participated in a senior thesis colloquium, a series of workshops led by three of the Center’s early career research scholars: Arthur Obst, Sara Purinton, and Elena Yi-Jia Zeng. The colloquium provided a structured space for students to share their works in progress, receive feedback, and engage with one another. The year concluded with the VPL Class Day, where graduating students gathered with family, friends, and the UCHV community to recognize their accomplishments, experiences, and plans for the future.

Top to bottom: Class of 2025 seniors at VPL’s Class Day. From top to bottom: Desmond Lam, Katie Horan, Alexis Allen, and Katharine Kalap.

Courses and Seminars

Values and Public Life Seminars

“Legal Foundations of Liberal Democracy”

CHV 480 / POL 480

Wojciech Sadurski

“Realizing Democracy”

CHV 479 / POL 483

Pratap Bhanu Mehta

“Seminar in Political Theory: Political Theory and Social Change”

POL 410 / CHV 410

Temi Ogunye

“What Should We Eat? Ethics, Religion, Politics”

REL 365 / PHI 366 / CHV 316

Andrew Chignell

First-Year Seminars

“Civil Disobedience: Breaking the Law From Socrates to the Civil Rights Movement”

Peter Wirzbicki

Peter T. Joseph ’72 Freshman Seminar in Human Values

“Is Politics a Performance?”

Aaron Landsman

Paul L. Miller ’41 Freshman Seminar in Human Values

“Reasons to Believe: Religions of Enlightenment”

Flora Champy

Dean Eva Gossman Freshman Seminar in Human Values

“Tragedy and the Meaning of Life”

Rhodri Lewis

Kurt & Beatrice Gutmann Freshman Seminar in Human Values

“Who Is My Neighbor?”

Eric S. Gregory

Professor Amy Gutmann Freshman Seminar in Human Values

“Say What?! Making Sense of Intercultural (Mis) Communication”

Adriana G. Merino

Class of 1976 Freshman Seminar in Human Values

“Understanding Disasters”

Edward Tenner

University Center for Human Values Freshman Seminar (Anonymous)

Courses

“Christian Ethics and Modern Society”

REL 261 / CHV 261

Eric S. Gregory

“Dissertation Seminar”

CHV 599

Edward G. Baring

“Environmental Film Studies: Research Film Studio”

ECS 489 / CHV 489 / HUM 485 / ENV 489

Erika A. Kiss

“European Intellectual History in the Twentieth Century”

HIS 369 / CHV 369

Edward G. Baring

“Ethics and Economics”

ECO 385 / CHV 345

Thomas C. Leonard

“Ethics and Public Policy”

SPI 370 / POL 308 / CHV 301

Stephen J. Macedo

“Global Justice”

POL 313 / CHV 313

Charles R. Beitz

“Global Political Thought”

POL 476 / CHV 476

Pratap Bhanu Mehta

“Introduction to Moral Philosophy”

PHI 202 / CHV 202

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

“Philosophy of Mind”

PHI 315 / CHV 315 / CGS 315

Mark Johnston

“Philosophy, Religion, and Existential Commitments”

PHI 211 / CHV 211 / REL 211

Lara M. Buchak

“Religion and Reason”

REL 264 / CHV 264 / PHI 264

Austen D. McDougal

“The Sociology of Law”

SOC 405 / CHV 405

Kim Lane Scheppele

“Sociological Theory”

SOC 302 / CHV 302

Shamus R. Khan

“Unlocking the Science of Human Nature”

PSY 333 / CHV 300 / CGS 333

Molly J. Crockett

Above: Sandra Bermann, director of VPL, speaks at the 2025 Class Day celebration.

Professors Eric Gregory and Andrew Chignell chat with VPL senior Katie Horan at Class Day

Film Forum

The Film Forum convenes at various campus theaters under the direction of Erika A. Kiss. The screened films are followed by comments from faculty and a discussion. The series, which is open to the public, is supported by a gift from Bert G. Kerstetter ’66.

SEPTEMBER 3, 2024

Film Screening of “Spinoza: 6 Reasons for the Excommunication of the Philosopher” (2023) and Conversation With the Film’s Director David Ofek and Yitzhak Melamed

NOVEMBER 13, 2024

Film Screening of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” (1982) and Conversation With the Film’s Director Pat Hartley

MAY 19, 2025

Film Screening of “E.1027 Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea” (2024) and Conversation With the Film’s Director Beatrice Minger on “Modernism, Misogyny, and Other Matters” (Jointly sponsored with the Forum for the History of Political Thought)

Research Film Studio

Directed by Erika Kiss, the Research Film Studio offers Princeton students and faculty the opportunity to develop their research ideas through short films and other immersive and mixed-media publications. The Research Film Studio regularly invites award-winning film directors to campus to share about the art of filmmaking.

Fall 2024

OCTOBER 12-20

Fall break visit to “ArtHouse Memes” exhibit at the 2024 Venice Biennale of Art

Spring 2025

MARCH 9-14

Filmmakers’ Camp - Los Angeles

APRIL 9

“Genius Loci” – The Research Film Studio’s exhibition on view at the 2025 Venice Biennale of Architecture

JUNE 2-9

Filmmakers’ Camp – Mallorca

Human Values Forum

With support from Bert G. Kerstetter ’66, the Human Values Forum provides an opportunity for undergraduates, faculty members, graduate students, and visiting faculty to meet in an informal setting to discuss current and enduring questions concerning ethics and human values.

Fall 2024

SEPTEMBER 11

“Ideal and Nonideal Theories of Social Justice”

Temi Ogunye, Politics

SEPTEMBER 16

“U.S. Citizens in the U.S. Territories: The Forgotten Agenda for American Democracy”

Eduardo Bhatia ’86, School of Public and International Affairs

SEPTEMBER 23

“Making Space for Democracy”

Jan-Werner Müller, Politics

SEPTEMBER 30

“The Supreme Court: How Did We Get Here? And, What Comes Next?”

Charles M. Cameron, Politics and Public Affairs

OCTOBER 7

“A War Crime Analysis of the Gaza Conflict”

Kenneth Roth, School of Public and International Affairs

OCTOBER 21

“What Was the Civil War Really About?”

Allen C. Guelzo, James Madison Program

OCTOBER 28

“Rousseau: Political and Sexual Consent”

Flora Champy, French and Italian

NOVEMBER 4

“The U.S. Election, Consciousness, and the Lesser of Evil”

Vera S. Candiani, History

NOVEMBER 11

“Is the Constitution Failing?”

Charles R. Beitz , Politics

NOVEMBER 18

“When Should Utilitarians Say We Do Something Morally Wrong?”

Michael Smith, Philosophy

NOVEMBER 25

“Getting Lucky in Ethics and Epistemology”

Sarah E. McGrath, Philosophy

DECEMBER 2

“Glaucon’s Division of Goods in Republic Book II”

Benjamin C. Morison, Philosophy

Spring 2025

JANUARY 27

“The Supreme Court: How Did We Get Here? And, What Comes Next?”

Charles M. Cameron, Politics

FEBRUARY 3

“How Liberalism Felt: What It Was Like to Be Raised by Midtwentieth Century Middle Brow, Mixed Race, Moderate Liberals”

Jeff Nunokawa, English

FEBRUARY 10

“The Arc of the Moral Universe Bends Toward Justice? Hope, Progress, and the Philosophy of History”

Eric S. Gregory, Religion

FEBRUARY 17

“The Tension Between Reducing Poverty or Carbon Emissions in Developing Countries”

Seema Jayachandran, Economics and School of Public and International Affairs

FEBRUARY. 24

“War, Knowledge, and the Humanities”

Yair Mintzker, History

MARCH 3

“Democratic Capitalism at the Crossroads”

Carles Boix , Politics and School of Public and International Affairs

MARCH 17

“Radical Attention: Ethics, Politics, Activism”

D. G. Burnett , History

MARCH 24

“On Ethical Dilemmas of Reading the Avant-garde: The Case of Annemarie

Schwarzenbach”

Barbara N. Nagel, German

MARCH 31

“Mediocracy or Meritocracy”

Göran M. Blix, French and Italian

APRIL 14

“The Tension Between Values and Interests in America’s Foreign Policy in the Middle East”

Bernard A. Haykel, Near Eastern Studies

APRIL 21

First Annual Peter Singer Dinner, “Discussing the Relationship Between Scholarship and Activism”

Matthew J. Karp, History

Student Prizes and Grants

Senior Thesis Prize

Each year, the Center awards prizes to senior theses that make an outstanding contribution to the study of human values. Nominations for the prize are made by departments across the University.

“Narrating Homelessness: The Construction, Interpretation, and Reframing of Unhoused Experience in Bureaucracies of Care”

Amaya Dressler, Anthropology

“Competition, Ethics, and Practical Reason”

Thomas Rosini, Philosophy

“Against Theodicy in the Holocaust Memorials of Berlin and Vienna”

Adam Sanders, Religion

Short Movie Prize

Sponsored by UCHV, this award is given to undergraduates who produce the best short film.

CO-WINNERS

“Bunyip Country” by Joe M. McCauley ’26

“August” by Yi Jin Toh ’25

HONORABLE MENTIONS

“Ibu Perak” by Isabel F. Irwin ’27

“The Perpetual Motion Machine” by Allison M. Lesser ’27

Graduate Student Merit Awards

UCHV offers prizes to help attract graduate students to Princeton whose work explicitly focuses on ethics, political theory, and human values. In spring 2025, the following incoming students were awarded these grants:

Thayer Anderson, English

Ward Awad, Comparative Literature

Signe Düring Nielsen, Anthropology

Margaux Emmanuel, French and Italian

Benjamin Frogel, Religion

Benjamin N. Gross-Loh, Politics

Gabriel Kim, Philosophy

Yeaju Kim, Psychology

Emma Larson, History

Elizabeth G. Latham, Religion

Erica Liu, History

Matteo Moretti, Classics

Eira E. Murphy, English

Frederico Nogueira Teixeira, Architecture

Brooklyne Oliveira, Religion

Eli Pallrand, Politics

Xin Qing, East Asian Studies

Julia Riva Robertshaw, German

Anna R. Tyshkov, Anthropology

Jingyue (Roy) Zhang , Architecture

Political Philosophy

Graduate Research and Travel Grants

The Center and the Program in Political Philosophy offer political philosophy research and travel grants. The grants are supported by a fund established by Amy Gutmann, former provost of the University and founding director of UCHV. The following students received grants in the 2024–25 academic year:

Theodore B. Becker-Jacob, Philosophy

Mollie C. Eisner, Politics

Hajra Farooqui, Religion

Chelsea Guo, Politics

Onsi A. Kamel, Religion

Antonio Lessa Kerstenetzky, Philosophy

Anin Luo, History of Science

João Marques Carvalho, Philosophy

Faiza Masood, Religion

Zainab Rashid, Religion

Lynnea Shuck , Politics

Toha Toriq , Religion

Simon Christian Vöhringer, Politics

Jocelyn Wilson, Politics

Darren J. Yau, Religion

Supporting Research

Graduate Prize Fellow Halee Robinson at the fall welcome dinner.

Supporting Research

The University Center for Human Values seeks to advance original scholarship relating to human values in several ways, including sponsoring visiting faculty fellowships, visiting professorships for distinguished teaching, postdoctoral research appointments, and dissertation-stage fellowships for outstanding Princeton graduate students. The research reports presented in this section illustrate the reach and quality of the work carried out under the Center’s auspices.

A main feature of the visiting fellows program is a regular lunch seminar at which the Center’s visitors and faculty members present their work to an audience of peers. The graduate fellows meet regularly during their own research seminars and for other professional development opportunities, which are also provided to UCHV’s postdoctoral research associates. As the research reports attest, the systematic criticism and discussion of work in progress are among the principal benefits of affiliation with the Center.

Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Professors for Distinguished Teaching

This professorship is part of the 250th Anniversary Visiting Professorships for Distinguished Teaching (VPDT) program. Each VPDT teaches an undergraduate course and engages in other activities aimed at improving teaching at Princeton.

Craig Calhoun (Fall 2024)

Appointment as a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching gave me exciting opportunities to advance my teaching, research, and thinking. Teaching classical social theory and the history of sociology to Princeton doctoral students remains a privilege and a pleasure. It is also a chance to help outstanding students who intend to be empirical researchers

think through how knowing more about the nature of theory, the range of classical theories, and the history of the discipline can inform their work and scholarly development. At the same time, it pushes me to rethink these same themes. Both sociology and interdisciplinary social theory have changed faster than typical course plans. It is crucial to rethink the nature and place of theory, what we regard as “classics,” and how we narrate, build on, and draw from our history. I address these themes in teaching and in writing a new book.

UCHV intellectual conversations were also stimulating and supportive for other projects. My new course on “The Conservative Tradition in Sociological Thought” will be offered for the first time this fall. Additionally, a presentation at a UCHV seminar helped me improve a now-published paper and advance the writing of a book about the multiple intellectual traditions informing contemporary right-wing politics, both in the U.S. and internationally.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta

(Spring 2025)

The intellectual vibrancy of UCHV made spring 2025 very productive. I taught two courses: “Global Political Thought” and “Realizing Democracy.” In addition, I gave guest lectures at three other classes. On the research side, I completed one major project: a long co-authored (with Madhav Khosla) law review article on “The Rule Caste: Law, Democracy, and Identity in India.” This was presented both as a Laurance S. Rockefeller (LSR) and a Program in Law and Normative Thinking (PLANT) seminar. This is being published in the fall. It is also under review by an academic publisher for conversion into a book. I also made substantial progress on a book on global political thought. Parts of this book were delivered as the Trinity Global Humanities Lecture Series at the University of Cambridge in May. In addition, Princeton’s amazing lineup of seminars provided opportunities to explore other topics by way of talks. I presented at two pedagogy workshops: Wojciech Sadurski’s workshop on teaching comparative constitutionalism and Rahul Sagar’s workshop on teaching global political thought. In April, I gave a talk at the Rethinking World Order conference, organized by G. John Ikenberry. I also continued to pursue my interest in democratic backsliding, giving papers at the New York University School of Law and the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.

Wojciech Sadurski (Spring

2025)

As a Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching, I taught a seminar titled “Legal Foundations of Liberal Democracy,” which was both a challenge and a source of great satisfaction. It was challenging to teach legal theories to undergraduate students with no prior experience in legal systems, and it was extremely satisfying as my students were highly receptive and actively engaged in the class. During the term, I also participated in various UCHV events and PLANT seminars run by Kim Lane Scheppele. In addition, I had the opportunity to present my research at some other U.S. universities, including the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and Emory University in Atlanta. I also presented my critique of the recent legal opinions by the European Commission on Democracy through Law (also known as the Venice Commission) at a Venice Commission conference.

I nearly completed an extensive research project with a tentative title of “Getting Out of Populism,” in which I explore various conditions that facilitate victory of democrats against incumbent authoritarian populists, as well as the main dilemmas—legal and political—raised by a “post-populist predicament” in countries such as Brazil and Poland, where democratic governments face a rule-of-law conundrum of having to restore

democracy in an “institutional minefield.” I hope to complete the full text of the book later this year. Overall, the spring term of 2025 was one of the most productive and enjoyable periods in my academic life, thanks to a unique intellectual environment at the Center, for which I am deeply grateful.

Rahul Sagar

(Spring 2025)

As a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching, I had the great joy of engaging deeply with both students and faculty. My time at UCHV was transformative in several respects. I completed my book manuscript, “The Birth of Indian Liberalism,” and organized a workshop titled “What Is Comparative/What Is Global?,” which brought together political scientists, historians, and philosophers from around the world to examine the vexing question of how we might learn from and across different cultures. The event was a success— so much so that not one but two journals have expressed interest in publishing the papers presented. And then there is UCHV’s secret sauce: The unparalleled opportunity it offers visitors to hear from and interact with a diverse array of prominent scholars and practitioners, in an environment that is as kind and friendly as it is hospitable and efficient. I am not the first to say it, and I certainly won’t be the last—UCHV is truly a blessing to our profession!

Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellows

These 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.

Gwen Bradford

With the exceptionally generous support of the UCHV, I made great strides in my project on uniqueness. In this project, I investigate the question of what it is for a thing to be unique and when, if ever, being unique is relevant to value.

During my time at UCHV, I focused largely on the segment of this project that is concerned with the uniqueness and value of objects such as historical artifacts. I completed two papers: “Evil Artifacts and Extrinsic Value,” which I presented at the LSR seminar series, as well as at Yale University and several other venues, and “The Value of Historical Artifacts,” which I presented at the American Society for Aesthetics in Philadelphia. This pair of papers develops an account of the value of historical objects and artifacts that covers not only their positive but also their negative value to account for “evil artifacts,” such as Nazi memorabilia or historical torture devices.

I also completed a paper titled “The Limits of Consciousness and Moral Status,” which develops a theme from my uniqueness project that pushes skeptically at the value of consciousness.

This year also culminated in the publication of my paper “Failure” in a highly anticipated volume on ill-being from Oxford University Press, which is a companion to my earlier work on achievement. My first official publication in aesthetics also found itself in print: “Ross and Aesthetic Value” was published in a new volume from Oxford University Press. It has been exceptionally rewarding to enjoy the company of my fellow fellows, and my work (and spirit) benefited greatly from their conversation and collegiality.

Anne Gray Fischer

I have never before experienced the level of professional care and support that UCHV provides. Alan Patten was a warm and effective chair, and the staff were remarkably helpful and responsive, especially Kim Girman, Dawn Disette, and Tammy Hojeibane. All year, I wished I could bottle the energy, peace, and inspiration I felt while working here! I will miss my office in Green Hall and the feast of programming sponsored by the Center.

Historians are book people, and by this metric, I had a successful year: I read and researched deeply and wrote two chapters. At my workshop, the sharp comments and generous

feedback were exactly what I needed to chart my revision agenda. I delivered a talk on my current research at Sapienza University of Rome and attended two gun studies conferences to learn more about this subfield relevant to my work.

But the real value of this year can’t be quantified: my delightful visit to an undergraduate class when one of my articles was on the syllabus, our Tuesday happy hours after our LSR seminars, lunch with new friends at Mamoun’s Falafel, the changing seasons in this uniquely beautiful town—and, of course, the incredible Firestone Library. I am profoundly grateful for this year of space and freedom to think at the Center!

Roger Maioli

I came to UCHV to write a book on the intellectual and literary history of relativism. The book tracks, for the first time, the origins, features, and consequences of relativism in Britain and France from the 1550s to the 1810s. This history, I claim, reveals a common genealogy behind two seemingly disparate Enlightenment legacies. Defenses of natural rights and secular ethics, on the one hand, and of racial and gender hierarchies, on the other, were shaped by attempts to reaffirm

objective distinctions (between actions and between humans) against the threat of relativism.

Having come to Princeton with years of research on primary and secondary sources, what I needed was a conducive setting for thinking and writing. I could not have found a better one. I found stimulation in a friendly cohort of fellows, many of whom pursued topics adjacent to mine, with different disciplinary orientations; I had a spacious office just six minutes away from home and five from the always-to-bemissed Firestone Library; and I had the luxury of daily walks down Washington Road to see the wildlife at the canal. I drafted four book chapters (totaling more than 150 pages), one of which I discussed at the LSR seminars. I finished one article, which is currently under review, and two presentation papers for conferences in Oxford, England, and Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

A fellowship year is a year of personal change, and, to me, the biggest change was driven by the residual presence of Peter Singer in the hallways of Green Hall. I had long felt the need to become more active with regard to animal rights. Peter’s work, which I read in the evenings, convinced me to go vegan and join a series of current initiatives in defense of other species. Animal rights now receive modest attention in my current book, and I see my future scholarship tending that way.

With the generous support of UCHV, I made meaningful progress on several research fronts. I completed a new paper exploring the implications of intersectionality for the metaphysics of race, which benefited greatly from insightful feedback at the LSR seminar. I also developed a paper on gender abolition, which I had the opportunity to present at the “Fordham Workshop in Social and Political Philosophy” and the social philosophy workshop at Vassar College. In addition to these new projects, I completed several existing projects and shared work on intersectionality with audiences at Temple University, Bard College, the University of Eastern Piedmont “Amedeo Avogadro,” and the American Philosophical Association Pacific Division. I also greatly benefited from attending an array of stimulating talks and conferences sponsored by UCHV, such as the “Political Epistemology and Oppression” and “Beyond Medical and Social Models of Disability” workshops. Perhaps most valuably, I had the chance to engage in ongoing, generative conversations with colleagues and graduate students at Princeton. I’m grateful for the intellectual community, resources, and support provided by UCHV that made this past year so productive.

Carolina Sartorio

My main research topic was the interaction between moral claims— specifically claims about moral responsibility, and metaphysical claims—specifically claims about causation and similar metaphysical notions. I worked on developing and defending a view that, although moral responsibility is grounded in metaphysical notions like causation (and not the other way around), sometimes we can use moral judgments as guides to the underlying metaphysical structure. This is when the moral features of a situation are on a clearer standing than the underlying metaphysics, and in those cases, I argue, ethics can inform metaphysics. I presented my work at a variety of places—the LSR seminar, a conference at Florida State University, a graduate seminar at the University of Notre Dame, a law and philosophy speaker series at Yale University, and a workshop on agency at The University of Chicago. I also participated in a workshop on agency and responsibility at Cornell University, in an author-meetscritics session at a meeting of the American Philosophical Association in New York (on my recent book, “Causalism: Unifying Action and Free Action”), and gave a series of invited lectures chaired by José Gaos over a couple of weeks at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City. In addition to the numerous lectures and events at UCHV, I participated in various events organized by the vibrant Princeton philosophy department.

Annette Martín

Michael Sierra-Arévalo

During my year at UCHV, I completed a proposal for my next book, which focuses on the rise of “veteran influencers” in the decades since 9/11 and the onset of the global war on terror (GWOT). I argue that three structural forces—the internet, the GWOT, and the entrenchment of the military-civilian divide—set the stage for 21st-century veterans to commoditize their military experience for mass consumption. In turn, veteran influencers reshaped popular culture, masculinity, and our contemporary politics.

This project is a marked departure from my prior work on U.S. policing and required expansion into unfamiliar scholarly territory. The proposal benefited immensely from the expertise and generosity of philosophers, historians, lawyers, and humanities scholars that UCHV brings together.

I had the opportunity to present my research to Princeton’s Department of Sociology, the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) Criminal Justice @ SPIA initiative, and the Rutgers University Dean’s Distinguished Lectureship. The time and resources provided by UCHV also allowed me to continue ongoing research related to artificial intelligence (AI) -based analysis of police body-worn video, as well as the completion of a manuscript on the “policing industrial complex.”

I also continued my service on the Public Safety Commission for Austin, Texas, and multiple research advisory boards on policing and gun violence initiatives.

This fellowship is a unique opportunity to think broadly, deeply, and in the

company of brilliant colleagues outside of my home institution and discipline. I leave UCHV energized by the LSR fellows with whom I spent this academic year, as well as the broader Princeton community.

I have enjoyed a glorious year at UCHV, taking part in political theory and history workshops, as well as attending several featured lectures. I presented “Reasoning From Injustice” at the LSR seminar, and the essay is now forthcoming in the Michigan Journal of Race and Law. I also made progress on a book manuscript with the same name, which develops an account of politics that is capable of diagnosing why injustice persists in a modern constitutional democracy that is otherwise fairly well ordered. I presented a related project titled “Norms of Revision” during a Program in Law and Public Policy talk.

I also gave several public lectures during my time at Princeton. In fall 2024, I was honored to give Hamilton College’s Constitution Day Lecture: “The Vigor of Government Is Essential to the Security of Liberty.” I presented “What’s the Problem With Constitutional Veneration?” at a Harvard University celebration of Aziz Rana’s new book, “The Constitutional Bind.” At the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, I gave a book lecture on “Demand the Impossible” and participated in a roundtable on criminal justice reform. In the spring, I traveled to the U.K. and gave the lecture, “Trump and the Fate of American Democracy,” at the Sheffield Centre for International and European Law.

During my year at UCHV, my public-facing essays and book reviews appeared in Public Books, Democracy Journal, The New Rambler, and Liberal Currents.

Daniel Wodak

This academic year at UCHV gave me a wonderful opportunity to finish many papers, primarily on a project on democracy and political equality. I wrote new papers on: a puzzle for how the U.S. Supreme Court understands one person, one vote (“Malapportionment: A Murder Mystery,” Northwestern University Law Review); why democracy cannot require equality of voting power; and a challenge to epistemic democracy. The latter two benefited immensely from feedback from the Princeton formal ethics group and the LSR seminar, respectively. I also finally completed and submitted four papers unrelated to this project. This work was all significantly shaped by many conversations with other LSR fellows and Princeton faculty, along with audiences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Virginia, Swarthmore College, Cornell University, Stanford University, Harvard University, and Temple University. I also participated in the always stimulating Political Philosophy Colloquium and other excellent events on campus, and I regularly met with other fellows and several excellent graduate students about their projects. The academic highlight of the year, for me, was organizing a two-day workshop, “New Work in Democratic Theory,” which was generously supported by the Center. This was such a treat. I am so grateful to UCHV and the other fellows, faculty, and staff.

Robert Tsai

UCHV Fellows in Law and Normative Thinking

These fellowships are awarded annually to outstanding practitioners, faculty members of any discipline, independent scholars, and lawyers. Fellows contribute to the intellectual life of the Center and SPIA.

Phoebe Okowa

During my tenure as a Fellow in Law and Normative Thinking, the first part of my research focused on the doctrinal and normative arguments advanced in support of the principle of intertemporal law and why it continues to present such an insurmountable obstacle to meaningful accountability for historical wrongs in international law. Through an empirical study of cases in selected jurisdictions, I sought to demonstrate that the extreme non-retroactivity argued for by supporters of intertemporal law finds no support in state practice. I am grateful for the research allowance, which made it possible for me to hire a research assistant with multilingual skills, who provided me with a detailed inventory of French, German, and Spanish decisions in support of retrospective accountability. My research project was in preparation for the Hague Academy of International Law lectures, which I will deliver in 2026 and will be published in the collected lectures of the Academy. As the fellowship comes to an end, I am able to confirm that I am close to having a full first draft of the lectures. In addition to the PLANT seminars where I presented my work in March, I will give the Kirby Lecture in International Law at the Australian National University in July on “Reading Climate Change Treaties: The International Court and Historic Responsibility for Greenhouse Gas Emissions.”

The lecture will be published in the 2025 Australian Yearbook of International Law.

Cristina Tilley

My year as a UCHV Fellow in the Program in Law and Normative Thinking was a genuine gift. I spent the year doing archival research and writing to support “Chasing Rights: Tort Law and Social Dignity.” The book argues that progressive cause lawyers have ignored the power of tort law in the quest for social justice. Excavating a dataset of 2,000 tort cases from this country’s founding era, it shows that personal injury litigation was the foremost site for community deliberation over indignities experienced by women, enslaved people, and the poor in the early republic. I presented article-length versions of this research at the PLANT seminar, the University of Toronto Series on Tort Law and Social Equality, and the New York University School of Law’s seminar on torts this year. And I will present an adjacent article, “Tort Originalism and the Rights Retained,” at the Loyola University Chicago Constitutional Law Colloquium in the months to come.

The rich menu of workshops, seminars, and public talks during the 2024 election and 2025 inauguration years were bracing opportunities to clarify my thinking about the respective roles of public law and private law in a polarized era. Thanks to a robust welcome from Law@Princeton, I spent the year in conversation about constitutional politics at Wallace Hall and in conversation about socio-legal thought at Wooten Hall. A resulting essay about the serrated edge between different American legal cultures, “Supreme Fragility and the Everyday Fix,” is forthcoming in the Michigan State Law Review.

Princeton’s generous and humane people, and its happy embrace of the audacious, have been a wellspring of creative thinking as I prepare to reenter the classroom. The constellation of events around the centenary of “The Great Gatsby,” for example, has led me to propose a Gatsby-themed legal history seminar for my students at the University of Iowa next year. Visiting Art@Bainbridge’s “Roberto Lugo / Orange and Black” installation of classical Greek vessels telling contemporary stories has reminded me that old forms can inspire new movements. And touring the Lapidus exhibit of Thomas Paine ephemera at Firestone has underlined the critical role of the university in times of discord. What a feast the year has been!

Postdoctoral Research Associate in Cognitive Science of Morality

The Postdoctoral Research Associate in Cognitive Science of Morality program supports promising scholars with a background in cognitive science or a related discipline whose research focuses on understanding social and/or moral cognition and its implications for normative theories.

Judy Kim

I’m grateful to be able to look back on my final year at UCHV. My main research interest is in how and why we tell narratives about moral actions (joint work with Molly J. Crockett). The psychological half of this project involves running empirical studies to understand narrator production and audience perceptions of moral narratives. The second, more philosophical half of my research has involved developing a theory of moral narrative exchange. This year, I was able to complete and submit three empirical papers on how narrators balance informational and reputational goals in moral narrative production— one on how this process is affected by power differentials between narrators and their audiences, and another on people’s folk epistemological attitudes toward testimony versus using virtual reality to learn about other people. I also advised one senior thesis and one junior thesis student. In the fall of 2025, I will start as an assistant professor in psychology at American University. I am very grateful for the support that UCHV gave postdocs through feedback on practice talks and professional development workshops.

Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Cognitive Science of Values

The Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Cognitive Science of Values program supports promising scholars with a background in cognitive science or a related discipline whose research focuses on understanding social and/or moral cognition and its implications for normative theories.

Joseph Sommer

During my first year as a postdoctoral associate at UCHV, I have benefited greatly from the Center’s rich, interdisciplinary environment. Exposure to related work in philosophy and religion has deepened both the empirical and theoretical dimensions of my research on belief. Over the past year, my research has focused on the cognitive science of belief, with an emphasis on the value of consistency among beliefs. In collaboration with Tania Lombrozo, I led two projects: one identifying inconsistencies in participants’ beliefs in real time, and another examining how people judge the rationality of inconsistencies across factual, moral, and religious domains.

Beyond these empirical projects, I revised a theoretical paper arguing that apparent differences in normative qualities (e.g., sensitivity to evidence) between perceptual and ideological beliefs may reflect differences in the evidence supporting them, rather than

distinct psychological mechanisms or attitudes. I also made progress on modeling experimental results to test my framework of the psychological processes involved in belief (Sommer et al., 2024).

In addition, I authored several invited commentaries on topics including religious belief and atheism, the connection between belief and behavior (with Kerem Oktar), and basic principles of belief in cognitive science.

Postdoctoral Research Associate in Ethics and Climate Change

The Postdoctoral Research Associate in Ethics and Climate Change program supports scholars who focus on the ethical dimensions of climate change and are informed by knowledge of climate science and policy. The fellowship is a joint endeavor with the High Meadows Environmental Institute.

Arthur Obst

I had a productive second and final year as a postdoctoral researcher in Princeton’s Climate Futures Initiative (CFI). Co-sponsored by UCHV and the High Meadows Environmental Institute, this initiative is predicated on the idea that positively shaping humanity’s collective global future requires empirically informed normative inquiry into climate change and the other great ecological crises of our time. In this spirit, I took the lead in organizing “Geoengineering in Crisis: The Princeton Workshop

on Geoengineering Ethics and Governance” that took place on campus last October. This workshop would prove to be a flagship CFI event, creating a crucible for leading international scholars from across the disciplines to think critically about the science and values underlying speculative “geoengineering” technologies. I also dedicated this last year to coordinating “Conversations on Environment, Responsible Energy, and Life” in the fall, serving as an undergraduate thesis workshop leader for UCHV’s Values and in Public Life minor, and spearheading a special issue on geoengineering ethics and governance that will appear in the leading journal Climatic Change. In addition, I signed a deal with Routledge to co-edit a new introductory text tentatively titled “Environmental Ethics Evolves” that will launch in 2027. Finally, I published a new paper titled “Wilderness Values in Rewilding: Transatlantic Perspectives” with my colleague Linde De Vroey.

Postdoctoral Research Associates in Philosophy and Religion

The postdoctoral position in the Princeton Project in Philosophy and Religion (3PR) supports highly promising scholars who are trained in one of the following: the philosophy of religion or related areas; the religious thought of some historical period; or culture, theories, and methods in the study of religion. Postdoctoral research associates in this position develop a research agenda in the philosophy of religion, broadly construed. This position is a joint endeavor of the University Center for Human Values, the Department of Philosophy, and the Department of Religion.

Austen D. McDougal

My second year at UCHV was a wonderful time for extending connections in the community here. My paper “Loving Your Enemy,” which was recognized as a runner-up for the Marc Sanders Prize in Philosophy of Religion, was also accepted in Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion. I’ve followed that up with work on several additional papers on love: the connection between love and gratitude, why love can be so difficult to get over in breakups, and what love aims at generally. In the fall, I taught “Religion and Reason,” an undergraduate course in comparative philosophy of religion. I utilized David Hume’s “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion” as both a thematic guide and a source for reflection on the virtues and vices of civic dialogue. In the spring, I led an undergrad reading group on liberation theology. I also ran 3PR’s work-in-progress group for faculty and grad students, and I got to participate in courses on “Philosophy of Law” and “Philosophy of Mind: Fear, Anticipation, and Buddhist Philosophy.” Finally, I’m grateful that UCHV has been such a supportive launchpad for two positions coming up for me: a year-long position as a faculty fellow at New York University’s Center for Bioethics this coming year, followed by a position as an assistant professor in philosophy in the fall of 2026 at the State University of New York at Binghamton.

Z Quanbeck

In my second year as a postdoc at UCHV, I benefited tremendously from attending a wide range of seminars, talks, workshops, and conferences at the Center, the philosophy department, and the religion department. I co-organized the “Virtual Kant Congress With a Cosmopolitan Purpose” (a decentralized series of virtual sessions curated by Kant societies and groups from around the globe to commemorate Immanuel Kant’s 300th birthday), the Princeton Project in Philosophy and Religion’s “Annual Conference on Existential Commitments and the Ethics of Belief,” and an upcoming workshop on “Kierkegaard, Objectivity, and Subjectivity.” I also cotaught an undergraduate course called “Religion and Scientific Objectivity” and led an undergraduate reading group on C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.

Thanks to UCHV’s generous research support, I’ve had the opportunity to work on several papers and deliver a variety of talks broadly related to the ethics of belief and its history. Specific topics I researched this year include: why our beliefs about other people matter morally; when we are required to form beliefs; whether the norms of epistemology affect how we ought to act; whether we have voluntary control over our beliefs; when we are required to feel emotions and how emotions can fittingly change over time; Thomas Aquinas’ ethics of belief; Søren Kierkegaard’s ethics of belief; and Kierkegaard’s views about whether we should defer to other people’s testimony about morality and religion.

I am extremely grateful to the vibrant community of faculty, postdocs, fellows, and staff at UCHV and the Princeton Project in Philosophy and Religion for making the past two years so intellectually enriching!

Postdoctoral Researcher in Moral Philosophy

The Postdoctoral Researcher in Moral Philosophy program supports scholars specializing in moral philosophy, broadly construed, including specific ethical questions, moral theory, and metaethics.

Sara Purinton

This year, I organized a workshop at UCHV on the philosophy of disability and bioethics, served as a senior thesis workshop leader in the Values and Public Life program, and participated in a faculty spotlight at Princeton’s AccessAbility Center — a new initiative run by the Office of Disability Services to promote conversations around ability, access, and difference on campus. I also attended a number of seminar sessions of Susan Brison’s and Victoria McGeer’s class, “Ethics: Moral Agency, Social Identity, and People-making Practices.”

My time at UCHV has shown me how valuable truly interdisciplinary academic spaces can be. Attending the LSR research seminars has been a particular highlight; these seminars not only introduced me to the work of scholars outside philosophy but also meaningfully shaped the way I think about my own research. For example, it was through discussions in the seminar that I began co-writing a paper with a fellow postdoc at the Center. The openness and intellectual generosity of the UCHV community created an environment where collaboration felt both natural and exciting.

Postdoctoral Researcher in Political Theory

The Postdoctoral Researcher in Political Theory program supports scholars specializing in political theory, including the history of political thought, normative analysis, and intellectual projects involving work jointly with other subfields in political science, related disciplines, or in interdisciplinary areas.

Elena Yi-Jia Zeng

My academic career had a wonderful start at UCHV. I received stellar support and a warm welcome from members of the Center and the Department of Politics, which has been tremendously helpful for me in navigating American academia for the first time. I completed my doctoral dissertation—which recently won Cambridge University’s Prince Consort & Thirlwall Prize and Seeley Medal for the best history dissertation of the year—and my book proposal was accepted by Cambridge University Press. UCHV generously sponsored my book manuscript workshop, enabling me to bring together leading philosophers, political theorists, and historians to explore the role of skepticism in modern moral and political thought. I was also invited to present my work at several seminars and conferences, including the “British History in the Long 18th Century” seminar at the University of London’s Institute of Historical Research, the University of Cambridge’s Political Thought and Intellectual History Seminar Series and the New York University School

of Law’s “The Just City” conference. UCHV’s support, meanwhile, enabled me to explore further my interests in skepticism’s relationship with pluralism and Viennese liberalism, which has yielded two journal articles currently under review. I enjoyed interdisciplinary intellectual exchanges in UCHV and the politics, philosophy, and history departments, especially the postdoc seminar, the LSR seminar, the 3PR working groups, the Political Philosophy Colloquium, and the Forum for the History of Political Thought. Last but not least, my fellow postdocs offered me great company and friendship— we saw each other through the course of job applications and nourished each other intellectually.

Laurance S. Rockefeller Graduate Prize Fellows

These fellowships, made possible by a gift from Laurance S. Rockefeller ’32, are awarded to Princeton graduate students with distinguished academic records who show great promise of contributing to scholarship and teaching about ethics and human values. Fellows participate in an interdisciplinary research seminar throughout the year. In the 2024-25 academic year, the seminar was convened by Edward G. Baring, associate professor of history and the University Center for Human Values.

Victoria A. Bergbauer

With the generous support of UCHV, I completed my dissertation. My research investigates what

happened to individuals after their release from incarceration. As a historian of modern Europe, I trace the trajectories of adolescents beyond the walls of confinement and reflect on key elements of modernity, including citizenship, the right of residence, labor as a coercive practice, and social mobility in the 19th century. Collaboration that spans disciplinary and temporal bounds is at the core of my research, and attending various UCHV-hosted events and the Graduate Prize Fellow seminars provided me with the platform to tackle these topics from a more holistic, cross-interdisciplinary angle. The fellowship year has continued to widen my perspective on normative issues. This broadened viewpoint has been invaluable for a collaborative research project that I am pursuing on the transimperial ties between punishment, displacement, and migration in the Atlantic world. The fellowship also afforded me time to complete the manuscript of the co-edited volume “Carceral Architecture: From Within and Beyond the Prison Walls” (coming out in September) and present my work in conferences and invited talks in the United States, Europe, and Brazil. I thank UCHV for the possibility to integrate into an intellectually stimulating and kind community that gathers around the critical study of human values and for all the positive interactions I was fortunate to have at the Center this past year.

As a Graduate Prize Fellow, I drafted two chapters of my dissertation— “The State of Respect,” which develops a partial justification of the state from the moral imperative to communicate

respect, and “Proportional Authority in Democratic Deliberation,” which defends a view of democracy in which citizens have authority in democratic deliberation in positive proportion to their stakes in the matter at hand. I also significantly revised three other chapters, on the (essentially communicative) nature of respect, on a moral attitude I term “heed,” and on the social theory of platformmediated moral communication.

I’ll present some of this work at the “99th Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association” and the annual meetings of the Association for Social and Political Philosophy and the American Political Science Association over the summer and early next fall. I’m immensely grateful to UCHV for supporting this work, which would have been (even) slower going without this year of focused research, and for providing a venue for sustained engagement across academic disciplines devoted to normative inquiry and the critical examination of human values. I have learned so much from my colleagues in the Center, and have benefited greatly from their generosity of time and intellect.

Reece A. Edmends

I’m very grateful to UCHV for funding me to write my doctoral dissertation on the Roman emperor Augustus’ engagement with the idea of freedom (libertas) in his political advertising. This year, I was able to complete my two final chapters. I plan to revise the project over the summer and defend it sometime in the late fall. In addition to my dissertation, I wrote an article, currently under review at a scholarly journal, about the

theory of natural law articulated by Cicero in his speeches of 43 B.C.

The fortnightly seminars with the other Graduate Prize Fellows were immensely enjoyable, and I appreciated the chance to present my research in an interdisciplinary setting. An even greater highlight, perhaps, was hosting my own academic conference in fall 2024 on “Of Marble and Mines: The Politics of Architecture, Freedom and Oppression in the Roman World.”

This gave me the chance to share ideas with classicists, archaeologists, and political theorists from various universities, and our discussions were extremely productive. The entire conference was held under the auspices of the Center, which provided generous financial and administrative support.

Andrew D. Hahm

I have made substantial progress on my research in the past academic year thanks to the support of the Center. Most importantly, this support enabled me to formulate and refine the ideas that now constitute two core chapters of my dissertation, which develops a democratic theory of the modern administrative state. The first chapter I wrote this year seeks to situate my dissertation topic within the history of political thought, while the second aims to articulate an account of political autonomy that constitutes the core philosophical intervention of the dissertation. The Center’s Graduate Prize Fellowship dissertation workshop and Program in Law and Normative Thinking workshop both served as venues for me to present early drafts of this work and receive clarifying feedback. Because of this support, I am now better situated to revise earlier chapters and draft new material as I begin to assemble a final version of the dissertation. I also significantly revised and presented work co-authored with another Graduate Prize Fellowship recipient, Darren J. Yau, at Northwestern University’s political theory graduate conference this past year.

Atticus Carnell

Finally, I benefited greatly from participating in a number of events hosted by the Center and from interacting with other scholars associated with the Center. Of particular help were professional development workshops hosted by Edward G. Baring and a workshop on recent work in democratic theory organized by Daniel Wodak. It has been an intellectually fruitful year for me, and I am grateful to have had the opportunity to learn from all of my fellow Graduate Prize Fellows and Center affiliates this year.

Sayash Kapoor

Over the past year as a Graduate Prize Fellow, I have advanced my research agenda of grounding artificial intelligence (AI) development in evidence and accountability. I finalized and launched “AI Snake Oil” (Princeton University Press, 2024), a trade book co-authored with Arvind Narayanan distilling my technical work for broader audiences. I also delivered over a dozen talks, including at Princeton, The George Washington University, and NASA. My academic output included several peer-reviewed papers at journals such as Science and Transactions on Machine Learning Research and conferences such as the Association for Computing Machinery’s “Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency.” My policy outreach ranged from teaching AI courses to over 100 policymakers to testimony for the New Jersey Legislature Assembly Committee on Science, Innovation, and Technology. Within UCHV,

seminar feedback sharpened my book talk, and the feedback helped me better engage with interdisciplinary academics during talks. Conversations across disciplines have refined my normative framing and clarified new research directions. I am grateful to Edward G. Baring and my cohort for their thoughtful critique and generous camaraderie.

Halee Robinson

As a Graduate Prize Fellow (GPF), I completed and submitted my dissertation, “‘They Taken Him Away From Us’: Race, Punishment, and the Intimate Histories of the Texas Prison System, 1865-1912.” The fellowship also provided the resources and space to work on job market materials, which assisted me in securing both a postdoctoral fellowship and a tenure-track job. The intellectual generosity of the interdisciplinary cohort of fellow Graduate Prize Fellows was instrumental to completing my dissertation and my success this academic year. In the spring semester, I presented a practice job talk to my cohort, and their questions and recommendations helped me to refine my ideas around justice, freedom, and intimacy in the post-Civil War Texas prison system. In addition to the GPF seminars, I attended professional development workshops on the academic job market and publishing, which provided helpful information. Overall, UCHV and the Graduate Prize Fellowship have been essential to my academic success this year, and I am thankful to UCHV for this opportunity.

Sebastián Rojas-Cabal

Thanks to the support I received from UCHV, I enhanced my presentation skills through the “Speaking for Impact, Influence, & Connection” GradFUTURES workshop and by presenting in the Graduate Prize Fellows seminar. I participated in valuable events, including Randall L. Kennedy’s Tanner Lectures on Human Values and the Constitution Day Lecture by Cass R. Sunstein. Notable engagements included meeting with Zaid AlAli to discuss my dissertation research on peace building and state building, along with attending Justice Luís Roberto Barroso’s presentation for the Justice John Marshall Harlan Lecture in Constitutional Adjudication. The professional development seminars on publishing from the dissertation and academic job interviews provided crucial career guidance. These activities collectively strengthened my research capabilities, professional network, and academic prospects.

Darren J. Yau

The Graduate Prize Fellowship was a wonderful part of this academic year. My research examines religious approaches to questions about justice and social reform, with particular attention to how religious commitments shape and are shaped by debates in political and social theory. The fellowship provided opportunities for me to advance research in several areas. My dissertation offers an interpretation of Martin Luther King Jr.’s political and religious thought, focusing specifically on his ideas of nonviolence as an ethic of social change. During the fellowship year, I finished two dissertation chapters and presented selections at conferences at Yale University and Stanford University. I was also able to develop other lines of research. In the fall, I published a paper on how two prominent mid-century Protestants used just war theory to defend the tactics of social movements. I also co-presented a paper with another UCHV fellow on Grace Lee Boggs’ ideas about revolution. Lastly, the cohort of graduate fellows was a bright spot of my fellowship year. Aside from receiving invaluable feedback, I was enriched by the presentations and conviviality of such a talented and cheerful cohort and will think of the seminars fondly in the years to come.

Elaine Yim

Thanks to the Graduate Prize Fellowship, I have made important progress on my dissertation, which is on the democratic values of social movements (with a focus on climate justice movements). I completed my fieldwork and drafted a few chapters of my dissertation. I also presented at a few conferences and submitted a coauthored paper to a journal for review. The Graduate Prize Fellowship also provided me with valuable opportunities to meet scholars from different fields and obtain feedback from them. I benefited tremendously from my interactions with them. Thanks to the support of UCHV, I co-organized (with a fellow graduate student) a workshop on ethnography and political theory. I am grateful to UCHV for its support and, in particular, to Edward G. Baring for leading the GPF seminar and providing valuable insights.

Christopher Zraunig

My year as a UCHV Laurance S. Rockefeller Graduate Prize Fellow has been deeply enriching. As a doctoral candidate in Princeton’s Department

of Anthropology, I research aging, care, and institutional life through the lens of queer and critical disability studies. My dissertation, “Queer Aging,” explores how LGBTQ+ inclusion efforts in geriatric care unfold in everyday institutional practice. Supported by the WennerGren Foundation and the American Ethnological Society, I conducted 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Berlin and New York City across care homes, advocacy organizations, and policy spaces.

Over the last academic year, I presented my work at the European Association of Social Anthropologists in Barcelona, Spain, the American Anthropological Association in Tampa, Florida, and the “Queer Pharma” workshop at the Free University of Berlin/Schwules Museum Berlin. I also contributed a chapter to “Queeres Altern Erzählt,” a forthcoming volume on queer aging in Germany (transcript Verlag, 2025). With the time, support, and camaraderie of the fellowship, I drafted three chapters of my dissertation. I’m especially grateful for the support of UCHV and my Graduate Prize Fellows cohort.

People

UCHV Advisory Council Member Anita Allen speaks to Professor Philip Pettit at the fall welcome dinner.

People

Faculty

Edward Baring

Associate Professor of History and Human Values; Acting Director, Early Career Research

Andrew Chignell

Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Religion and the University Center for Human Values

Molly J. Crockett

Associate Professor of Psychology and the University Center for Human Values

Christopher L. Eisgruber

President of the University;

Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the University Center for Human Values

Elizabeth Harman

Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy and the University Center for Human Values; Director, Early-Career Research (on leave 2024-25)

Erika A. Kiss

Director, University Center for Human Values Film Forum and Research Film Studio; Lecturer, Council of the Humanities, European Cultural Studies and Human Values (on leave spring 2025)

Stephen J. Macedo

Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics and the University Center for Human Values; Chair, Tanner Lectures on Human Values Committee

Victoria McGeer

Senior Research Scholar, University Center for Human Values

Alan W. Patten

Director, University Center for Human Values; Howard Harrison and Gabrielle Snyder Beck Professor of Politics

Philip N. Pettit

Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of the University Center for Human Values

Kim Lane Scheppele

Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs and the University Center for Human Values; Director, Program in Law and Normative Thinking

Executive Committee

Alan W. Patten

Director, University Center for Human Values; Howard Harrison and Gabrielle Snyder Beck Professor of Politics

Edward G. Baring

Associate Professor of History and Human Values; Acting Director, Early-Career Research

Charles R. Beitz

Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Politics; Professor of Politics

Sandra L. Bermann

Cotsen Professor in the Humanities; Professor of Comparative Literature; Director, Program in Values and Public Life

Lara M. Buchak Professor of Philosophy

Andrew Chignell

Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Religion and the University Center for Human Values

Gregory A. Conti

Associate Professor of Politics; Acting Director, Program in Political Philosophy; Laurance S. Rockefeller University Preceptor

Molly J. Crockett

Associate Professor of Psychology and the University Center for Human Values

Eric S. Gregory Professor of Religion

Elizabeth Harman

Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy and the University Center for Human Values; Director, Early-Career Research (on leave 2024-25)

Melissa Lane

Class of 1943 Professor of Politics (on leave 2024-25)

Tania Lombrozo

Arthur W. Marks ’19 Professor of Psychology; Director, Program in Cognitive Science; Codirector, Natural and Artificial Minds (on leave spring 2025)

Stephen J. Macedo

Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics and the University Center for Human Values; Chair, Tanner Lectures on Human Values Committee

Victoria McGeer

Senior Research Scholar, University Center for Human Values

Sarah E. McGrath

Professor of Philosophy

Jan-Werner Müller

Roger Williams Straus Professor of Politics; Director, Program in Political Philosophy (on leave 2024-25)

Philip N. Pettit

Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of the University Center for Human Values

Kim Lane Scheppele

Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs and the University Center for Human Values; Director, Program in Law and Normative Thinking

Michael Smith

McCosh Professor of Philosophy (on leave spring 2025)

Junior Faculty Fellows

Catherine Clune-Taylor

Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies; George H. and Mildred F. Whitfield

University Preceptor in the Humanities

Lidal Dror

Assistant Professor of Philosophy

Temi Ogunye

Assistant Professor of Politics

Associated Faculty

Elizabeth M. Armstrong

Associate Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, Princeton School of Public and International Affairs; Head, Butler College

Leora F. Batnitzky

Ronald O. Perelman Professor of Jewish Studies; Professor of Religion; Director, Program in Judaic Studies

João Biehl

Susan Dod Brown Professor of Anthropology; Chair, Department of Anthropology

Amy B. Borovoy

Professor of East Asian Studies

Michael A. Celia

Theodora Shelton Pitney Professor of Environmental Studies; Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Jonathan D. Cohen

Robert Bendheim and Lynn Bendheim Thoman Professor in Neuroscience; Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience; Associate Director, Natural and Artificial Minds

Alin I. Coman Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs

Nathaniel D. Daw

Huo Professor in Computational and Theoretical Neuroscience; Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology

Mitchell Duneier

Gerhard R. Andlinger ’52 Professor of Social Sciences; Professor of Sociology; Chair, Department of Sociology

Karen R. Emmerich

Associate Professor of Comparative Literature

Paul Frymer Professor of Politics

Daniel Garber

A. Watson Armour, III, University Professor of Philosophy

Sheldon M. Garon

Nissan Professor in Japanese Studies; Professor of History and East Asian Studies

Sophie G. Gee

Associate Professor of English

Robert P. George McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence; Professor of Politics; Director, James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions

Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

James S. McDonnell

Distinguished University Professor; Professor of African American Studies

Jonathan C. Gold Professor of Religion; Director, Center for Culture, Society and Religion

Lars O. Hedin

George M. Moffett Professor of Biology; Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the High Meadows Environmental Institute

Grace E. Helton

Assistant Professor of Philosophy; R.R. Laidlaw University Preceptor

Brooke A. Holmes

Susan Dod Brown Professor of Classics; Director, Gauss Seminars in Criticism

Mark Johnston

Henry Putnam University Professor of Philosophy

Thomas P. Kelly Professor of Philosophy

Martin Kern

Joanna and Greg Zeluck ’84 P13 P18 Professor in Asian Studies; Professor of East Asian Studies

Joshua I. Kotin

Associate Professor of English

Ilyana Kuziemko

Theodore A. Wells ’29 Professor of Economics; Professor of Economics and Public Affairs; Co-director, Griswold Center for Economic Policy Studies

Frances E. Lee

Professor of Politics and Public Affairs, Princeton School of Public and International Affairs; Co-director, Center for the Study of Democratic Politics

Thomas C. Leonard

Research Scholar, Council of the Humanities; Lecturer in Economics, University Center for Human Values, and Freshman Seminars

Sarah-Jane Leslie

Class of 1943 Professor of Philosophy; Professor of Philosophy and the Center for Statistics and Machine Learning; Co-director, Natural and Artificial Minds

Simon A. Levin

James S. McDonnell

Distinguished University Professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Anne McClintock

A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies and the High Meadows Environmental Institute

Helen V. Milner

B.C. Forbes Professor of Public Affairs; Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Princeton School of Public and International Affairs; Director, Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance

Benjamin C. Morison

Professor of Philosophy; Chair, Department of Philosophy

Naomi Murakawa

Associate Professor of African American Studies

Jacob M. Nebel

Professor of Philosophy

Rob Nixon

Thomas A. and Currie C. Barron Family Professor in Humanities and the Environment; Professor of English and the High Meadows Environmental Institute

Guy J. Nordenson Professor of Architecture

Jeff Nunokawa Professor of English

Serguei A. Oushakine Professor of Anthropology and Slavic Languages and Literatures; Acting Chair, Department of Anthropology; Director, Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies

Dan-el Padilla Peralta

Associate Professor of Classics

Gideon A. Rosen

Stuart Professor of Philosophy

Esther H. Schor

Advisory Council

Member Bert G. Kerstetter ’66 greets speaker

Alison McQueen at the spring James A. Moffett ’29 Lecture in Ethics

John J.F. Sherrerd ’52 University Professor; Professor of English; Chair, Council of the Humanities; Director, Stewart Seminars in Religion; Director, Program in Humanistic Studies

Paul E. Starr

Stuart Professor of Communications and Public Affairs in the School of Public and International Affairs; Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs

Frederick F. Wherry

Townsend Martin, Class of 1917 Professor of Sociology; Vice Dean for Diversity and Inclusion; Director, Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship Program

David S. Wilcove

Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Public Affairs and the High Meadows Environmental Institute; Vice Dean, Princeton School of Public and International Affairs

Advisory Council

Anita L. Allen

Henry R. Silverman Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School

Eric A. Beerbohm *08 Alfred and Rebecca Lin Professor of Government; Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Philosophy; Faculty Director, Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University

Bert G. Kerstetter ’66 President, Everfast, Inc.

Sara Ogger *00 Executive Director, Humanities New York

Henry S. Richardson Professor of Philosophy; Senior Scholar, Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University

Mark F. Rockefeller ’89 Founder and Chairman, Legacy Connect/ThatHelps

Debra Satz

Vernon R. and Lysbeth Warren Anderson Dean of the School of Humanities & Sciences; Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society; Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science, Stanford University

Administration

Alan W. Patten Director, University Center for Human Values; Howard Harrison and Gabrielle Snyder Beck Professor of Politics

Amber M. Almonte

Assistant Manager, Shared Services, Financial Support Services

Derek Balcom

Assistant Director, University Center for Human Values

Edward G. Baring

Associate Professor of History and Human Values; Acting Director, Early-Career Research

UCHV’s 2024-25 Executive Committee, LSR Fellows, and postdoctoral research associates.

Sandra L. Bermann

Cotsen Professor in the Humanities; Professor of Comparative Literature; Director, Program in Values and Public Life

Wayne Bivens-Tatum

Librarian for Philosophy, Religion and Anthropology

Julie Clack

Senior Communications Strategist

Gregory A. Conti

Associate Professor of Politics; Acting Director, Program in Political Philosophy; Laurance S. Rockefeller University Preceptor

Dawn M. Disette

Administrative Assistant

Kimberly Girman

Faculty Assistant/Program Event Coordinator

Tammy Hojeibane Event and Communications Specialist

Samuel Hontz

Undergraduate/Graduate Administrator

Erika A. Kiss

Director, University Center for Human Values Film Forum and Research Film Studio; Lecturer, Council of the Humanities, European Cultural Studies and Human Values (on leave spring 2025)

Lisa R. Kraut

Shared Grants Manager, Research and Project Administration

Stephen J. Macedo

Laurance S. Rockefeller

Professor of Politics and the University Center for Human Values; Chair, Tanner Lectures on Human Values Committee

Kimberly Murray Program Manager

Andrew P. Perhac

Technical Support Specialist

Kim Lane Scheppele

Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs and the University Center for Human Values; Director, Program in Law and Normative Thinking

Top: Advisory Council Member Anita Allen chats with UCHV Director Alan Patten at the fall welcome dinner

Bottom: Sandra Bermann wins Distinguished Faculty Service Award

Nondiscrimination Statement

In compliance with Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, Title VI and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and other federal, state and local laws, Princeton University does not discriminate on the basis of age, race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, pregnancy and related conditions, religion, national origin, ancestry, disability, genetic information, or veteran status in any phase of its employment process, in any phase of its admission or financial aid programs, or other aspects of its educational programs or activities. The vice provost for institutional equity and diversity is the individual designated by the University to coordinate its efforts to comply with Title IX, Section 504, Title VI and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and other federal, state, and local equal opportunity regulations and laws. Questions or concerns regarding these matters should be directed to Michele Minter, Vice Provost for Institutional Equity and Diversity, Princeton University, 201 Nassau Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544 or 609-258-6110. Further, inquiries about the application of Title VI or Title IX and supporting regulations may also be directed to the Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, Office for Civil Rights, U.S. Department of Education.

Design: Howard Design Group Princeton, NJ

Photographs: Denise Applewhite Sameer Khan / FotoBuddy

Princeton University Center for Human Values Annual Review 2024–25

Letter from the Director

Faculty Accomplishments

Deepening Understanding

Deepening Understanding

Tanner Lectures on Human Values

November 14-15, 2024

James A. Moffett ’29 Lectures in Ethics

Program in Ethics and Public Affairs

Fall 2024

Spring 2025

Political Philosophy Colloquium

Spring 2025

Forum for the History of Political Thought

Princeton Project in Philosophy and Religion

Recurring Events

Undergraduate Reading Groups

Conferences and Workshops

Sponsored Talks

Program in Law and Normative Thinking

Events

Seminars

Fall 2024

Spring 2025

Future Values Initiative

Fall 2024

Spring 2025

Academic Freedom Initiative

UCHV Collaborative Projects

Co-sponsored Series, Events, and Conferences

Special Events

Teaching and Learning

Teaching and Learning

Values and Public Life Program

Film Forum

Research Film Studio

Fall 2024

Spring 2025

Human Values Forum

Student Prizes and Grants

Graduate Student Merit Awards

Graduate Research and Travel Grants

Supporting Research

Supporting Research

Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Professors for Distinguished Teaching

Craig Calhoun (Fall 2024)

Pratap Bhanu Mehta

Wojciech Sadurski (Spring

Rahul Sagar

Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellows

Anne Gray Fischer

Roger Maioli

Carolina Sartorio

UCHV Fellows in Law and Normative Thinking

Cristina Tilley

Postdoctoral Research Associate in Cognitive Science of Morality

Judy Kim

Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Cognitive Science of Values

Joseph Sommer

Postdoctoral Research Associate in Ethics and Climate Change

Arthur Obst

Postdoctoral Research Associates in Philosophy and Religion

Austen D. McDougal

Z Quanbeck

Postdoctoral Researcher in Moral Philosophy

Sara Purinton

Postdoctoral Researcher in Political Theory

Elena Yi-Jia Zeng

Laurance S. Rockefeller Graduate Prize Fellows

Victoria A. Bergbauer

Reece A. Edmends

Sayash Kapoor

Halee Robinson

Sebastián Rojas-Cabal

Elaine Yim

Christopher Zraunig

People

People

Faculty

Executive Committee