Fellows : Doctoral Research Scholars

The Witherspoon Institute has appointed three Doctoral Research Scholars (one postdoctoral scholar and two current Ph.D. candidates) whom the Institute will support in their various projects in the next few years. Please see below for details about their research interests:

    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.

Updated April 24, 2008