Announcement of New Senior Fellows and Doctoral Research Scholars. April 23, 2008

The Witherspoon Institute announces the addition of three professors to its roster of Senior Fellows and the appointments of three Doctoral Research Scholars (one postdoctoral scholar and two current Ph.D. candidates) whom the Witherspoon Institute will support in their various projects in the next few years. The Institute also has named Senior Fellow Robert P. George as the Director of the Program in Political Thought and Constitutional Government and Senior Fellow Harold James as the Director of the Program in Ethics, Culture, and Economic Development. Please see below for details about our new Fellows and Research Scholars.

The three new Senior Fellows of the Witherspoon Institute are as follows:

• Gerard V. Bradley is the Director of the Witherspoon Institute’s Center on Religion and the Constitution. He is a Professor of Law at Notre Dame Law School and a noted scholar in the fields of constitutional law as well as law and religion, having taught previously at the University of Illinois. Admitted to the New York Bar, he practiced law as an assistant district attorney with the New York County District Attorney’s Office. With Professor John Finnis, he has served as Director of Notre Dame’s Natural Law Institute and as co-editor of the American Journal of Jurisprudence. He is President of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, Vice-President of the American Public Philosophy Institute, a member of the board of advisors of the Cardinal Newman Society, Chair of the Federalist Society’s Religious Liberties Practice Group, and a member of the Ramsey Colloquium of the Institute on Religion and Public Life. He earned his B.A. from Cornell University and his J.D. from Cornell Law School.
• Kevin T. Jackson is a consultant on business ethics for organizations and leaders worldwide. He is a Professor of Business Ethics at Fordham University’s School of Business in New York City after having been a Visiting Assistant Professor at Georgetown University. He holds a B.A., M.A., and J.D. from Florida State University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland. Dr. Jackson has delivered seminars on ethics in the securities industry for the NASD, and has given presentations for executives, dignitaries, and financial services organizations, including LOMA/LIMRA. A frequent commentator in the news media on legal and ethical issues facing corporations, he has been on CBS Evening News, CNN, Fox News, and National Public Radio. He is the author of articles in academic journals of business ethics as well as the book Building Reputational Capital (Oxford University Press, 2004), in which he sought to reformulate traditional ethical principles into practical guidelines suited to the thinking of the modern business world. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
• Daniel N. Robinson is a member of the Philosophy faculty at Oxford University, where he has lectured annually since 1991. For thirty years he served on the faculty of Georgetown University, earning the title of Distinguished Professor. Professor Robinson earned his Ph.D. in Neuropsychology from City University of New York. Prior to taking his position at Georgetown, he held positions at Amherst College, Princeton University, and Columbia University. Professor Robinson is past president of two divisions of the American Psychological Association: the Division of History of Psychology and the Division of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology. He is former editor of the Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology. Professor Robinson is author or editor of more than forty books, including Wild Beasts and Idle Humours: The Insanity Defense from Antiquity to the Present, An Intellectual History of Psychology, The Mind: An Oxford Reader, and Aristotle’s Psychology. In 2001, Professor Robinson received a Lifetime Achievement Award and a Distinguished Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association.

The three new Doctoral Research Scholars of the Witherspoon Institute are as follows:

Soelve Curdts recently received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. Her work generally focuses on questions situated on the boundary between literature and philosophy, and she is now engaged in a book project that explores philosophical aspects of the writings of Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. She is currently a lecturer at Princeton University, both in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Center for Human Values.
• Ana Samuel is a doctoral candidate in Political Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and earned her A.B. from Princeton University in 2000. Her dissertation is a liberal defense of morals legislation drawn from the philosophy of Montesquieu, with particular concern for sexual morality in the law. Such an approach seeks to support many of the positions defended by the natural law tradition of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, despite the fact that Montesquieu, to whom the American Founders looked as an authority in political philosophy, rejected many of the ideas of Aristotle and Aquinas. For a time, Mrs. Samuel served as the first Executive Director of the Witherspoon Institute.
• Nicholas Joshua Teh plans to complete a dissertation in Philosophy of Physics in the D.Phil. program at Cambridge University, where he received the position of Research Scholar at Trinity College. Mr. Teh graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University with an A.B. in Astrophysics in 2005. Thereafter, he studied as a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh and as a visiting student in Harvard University’s Philosophy Department. He has research interests in various aspects of natural philosophy, including causation, laws of nature, dispositions or powers of things, and the definition of life. Apart from his primary research area, he has interests in action theory, moral psychology, and the nature of rationality. His work in these areas is informed by thinkers such as Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, and G. E. M. Anscombe, and seeks to develop and integrate their insights.