2024-25 Fellows Announcement

Fellows-In-Residence

Adriana Alfaro Altamirano is Assistant Professor of Political Theory at Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, in Mexico City. Her research explores questions regarding power, law, and agency as they appear in modern and contemporary political thought, from a comparative perspective. She is particularly interested in how our subjectivity—both individual and collective—is shaped by language, habit, reason, and emotion in different social, political, and legal settings. She is the author of The Belief in Intuition: Individuality and Authority in Henri Bergson and Max Scheler (Penn Press 2021). While at the Center, she will work on her project “The ‘Art of Listening’ and the Challenges of Spectatorship in the Digital Age” and on building out the Center’s civil discourse initiative. Adriana will be the Edmond & Lily Safra Center's inaugural Civil Discourse Fellow.

Selim Berker is Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University. He works on the foundations of normativity in all of its guises, including the normative assessment of action (in ethics), of belief (in epistemology), and—increasingly—of emotions (in moral psychology and aesthetics). He is also interested in more general issues in metaphysics connected to grounding, explanation, and dependence, often—but not always—with an eye toward their application in normative contexts. His primary research project at the moment involves questioning the assumption that we can divide up the normative categories into two major families: “the right” and “the good.” As he sees it, there is a third major family of normative categories, “the fitting,” with its own distinctive structural features and its own distinctive basis. Categories in this family include the merited, the apt, the warranted, the justified, and the called for, as well as response-involving properties such as the admirable, the blameworthy, the delightful, the interesting, and the tiresome. He is also working on the relation between reasons-to and reasons-why, on the prospects for question-oriented approaches in ethics and epistemology, and on the metaphysics of voting. 

Sonali Chakravarti is Professor of Government at Wesleyan University. Her work focuses on questions of emotions, the law, and democratic institutions. She is the author of two books—Radical Enfranchisement in the Jury Room and Public Life (University of Chicago Press, 2019) and Sing the Rage: Listening to Anger After Mass Violence (University of Chicago Press, 2014)—as well as numerous peer-reviewed articles and chapters in publications including Political Theory and the Journal of Law, Culture, and the Humanities. Her public writing on juries has appeared in the Boston Review, the Atlantic, the Guardian, the Nation, Dissent, and Jacobin. She is currently working on a manuscript about the meaning of impartiality for jurors who are critical of the legal system. Sonali has been the Ann Plato Post-Doctoral Fellow at Trinity College and Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellow at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. She earned a BA from Swarthmore College and a PhD in political science from Yale University.  

Itzel Garcia is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. She earned her PhD in Philosophy from UC Irvine in 2022. Her research focuses on issues surrounding the political authority of law enforcement officials, and she is especially interested in analyzing the moral relationship between police officers and the people they exercise power over. While at the Center, she will work on this topic in a book project organized around three themes: legal authority, republicanism, and border policing. Itzel will be a joint fellow with the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research.

Victor Kumar is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Boston University, where he is Director of the interdisciplinary Mind and Morality Lab. He received his PhD from the University of Arizona and held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Michigan and the University of Toronto. His primary philosophical interests are in ethics, cognitive science, and evolutionary theory. Victor's 2022 book A Better Ape (Oxford University Press), co-authored with Richmond Campbell, is about the evolution of morality and moral progress. His current work focuses on the psychological and cultural underpinnings of social change. 

Lukas J. Meier specializes in artificial intelligence, medical ethics, and neurophilosophy. Most recently, Lukas was a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Lukas studied philosophy at the University of Oxford and political science at the University of Göttingen. As part of a team developing an algorithm for ethical decision-making in the clinic, he also spent a year at the Technical University of Munich. His doctoral thesis, completed at the Universities of St Andrews and Heidelberg, linked the topic of brain death to the debate on personal identity. After exploring questions of distributive justice and triage in the COVID-19 pandemic, his current research focuses on the interrelation between brain-computer interfaces, machine intelligence, and consciousness. Lukas teaches in ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, political philosophy, and medical ethics. 

Marie Nicolini is an ethicist and psychiatrist whose research addresses moral questions related to mental disorders and their implications for medicine and public health. She was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health Department of Bioethics and was awarded a three-year research grant from the Research Foundation – Flanders, Belgium’s public research council. Her work has been published in journals such as the British Journal of Psychiatry, American Journal of Bioethics, Journal of Medical Ethics, and Psychological Medicine. She testified as an expert witness to the Canadian Parliament regarding the country’s medical assistance in dying law and has served in various ethics advisory roles for governmental and nonprofit organizations. She completed an MD, psychiatry residency, and a PhD in bioethics at KU Leuven University in Belgium. Marie will be a joint fellow with the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School. 

Roey Reichert’s research in the history of political thought and political theory is primarily driven by the problem of how to reconcile universal values with particular cultural identities and with the corollary tension between cosmopolitanism and nationalism. Roey received his doctoral degree in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles. His dissertation examined the conceptual relationship between nationalism and cosmopolitanism in Kant’s political thought and argued that it should be understood within the wider context of Kant’s philosophical anthropology. He is currently expanding this project into a comparative study that will examine these themes in the writings of Johann Gottfried Herder and Georg Forster as well. In addition to the political and anthropological thought of the German Enlightenment, his other interests include theories of nationalism and modernity, as well as the social philosophy of Ernest Gellner. Roey is also an associate fellow of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Enlightenment Studies at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, Germany, where he previously held a DAAD Research grant for doctoral candidates. Roey is an Exchange Fellow with the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Tel Aviv University.

Eliza Wells is a philosopher whose research focuses on the normative dimensions of our social roles. She completed her PhD in Philosophy at MIT, and her BA and MA at Stanford University. In 2025, she will be an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Manitoba. Eliza’s work pushes back against standard attempts to evaluate social roles and their occupants in purely moral terms. Her dissertation developed the view that our social roles—as friends, citizens, professionals, and family members—come with norms on both action and deliberation that play a distinctive coordination function. This can generate good normative reasons for role-occupants to comply even with norms that conflict with moral considerations. While at the Center, she will work on a project further developing this account and exploring its implications for normative theory, social change, and responsibility for structural injustice. 

Edmond J. Safra Graduate Fellows 

Alysha Banerji is a PhD candidate in Education at Harvard University, and a National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellow. In her dissertation, she explores university responses to forced migration and displacement, and the implications of these initiatives for situating universities as global civic actors. Previously, she has been an Ethics Pedagogy Fellow at the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, a McPherson Fellow at the Center for Ethics and Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Dissertation Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. She has also served on the Editorial Board of the Harvard Educational Review from 2020-2022. Prior to her doctoral training, Alysha worked towards increasing educational access in a diverse range of contexts, including work in college access in the US, managing SAT preparation and college application support programs for low-income and first-generation youth across Massachusetts. She holds a BA in Philosophy from Hamilton College, and an M.S.Ed in International Education Development from the University of Pennsylvania.

Yi Ning Chang is a PhD Candidate in political theory at Harvard’s Department of Government. She is writing a dissertation on the end of anticolonial politics. Through a study of 1950s–60s Southeast Asia, the project examines the relationship between decolonization and the remaking of politics in the postcolony. It asks how normative commitments to citizenship, welfare, and other anticolonial demands were reconsidered and rearticulated after the end of empire, and what that might mean for postcolonial politics today. Based on archival and library work in four languages and six countries, the dissertation intervenes in the political theory of anticolonialism and empire, as well as related debates in the history of twentieth-century political thought. 

William Conroy is a PhD candidate in urban studies and planning at Harvard University. He is broadly interested in developing an abstract-theoretical account of capitalist urbanization and the production of space in capitalist society. In line with this agenda, William’s ongoing dissertation project tracks the shifting place of “the urban” in American anti-imperial thought between 1928 and 1977, engaging its invocation as a site of political intervention and category of socio-spatial analysis. His contention is that this intellectual-historical undertaking provides a distinctive vantage on to not only the political, economic, and ecological implications of capitalist urbanization during that conjuncture, but on to some of most vexing questions in socio-spatial theory regarding the constituent features of capitalist urbanization as well.    

Liya Haefner is a PhD candidate studying political theory and the history of political thought in the Harvard Department of Government. Her dissertation examines the history and politics of pardon and oblivion, as well as contemporary debates on forgiveness and forgetting. In brief, her dissertation focuses on the following question: How can people peacefully coexist when there are events in their collective past that can conjure up feelings of resentment, anger, and hate towards each other? Prior to Harvard, she received her BA in Political Science and Economics from the University of California, Berkeley. 

Matthew Macdonald is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at Harvard University. His dissertation addresses a tension, facing liberal democracies, between the need to combat misinformation and the need to protect freedom of speech. This tension is important, because both excessive misinformation and excessive censorship each carry significant dangers, including dangers to democracy itself. Matt argues that the ethical interests underlying the right to free speech also generate a distinctive (but unrecognized) right against many serious forms of misinformation; and that this “anti-misinformation right” interlocks with the free speech right in ways that are consistent and informative. He has additional research projects in political epistemology, extremism, and the aesthetics of propaganda. Matt, who is from New Zealand, holds an MA in Philosophy from Victoria University of Wellington, and worked as a Policy Advisor for the New Zealand government prior to his time at Harvard. In 2023 he was a Technology & Human Rights Fellow with the Carr Center for Human Rights at the Harvard Kennedy School. 

Guy Rubinstein is an SJD candidate at Harvard Law School, where he is also a Clark Byse Fellow. In his dissertation, Guy focuses on the American criminal justice system and researches the relationship between constitutional rights and the remedies for their violation. Throughout his work, he has explored how remedial considerations—as well as various and conflicting motivations and values—may influence the willingness of judges, prosecutors, and police officers to adhere to the Constitution. Guy’s research and teaching interests also include critical approaches to criminal justice (especially penal abolitionism and criminal justice minimalism) and anticorruption law and policy. His publications have appeared or are forthcoming in the Washington University Law Review, Boston College Law Review, and Wisconsin Law Review, among others. Prior to his graduate studies, Guy served as a law clerk and as a senior law clerk for Justice Meni Mazuz of the Supreme Court of Israel. He holds an LLB from Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law. 

Yuan Tian is a PhD candidate in philosophy with interests in ethics and the interpersonal aspects of epistemology. Parts of her dissertation look into the phenomena of playful conversations and interpersonal faith, i.e., faith in a person. Her larger project examines how these (and potentially other) particular phenomena enable us to shift our attention away from the dramatic moments of allocating desert and responsibility at the end of an interpersonal relationship, to focusing instead on how our relationships support us through practical or doxastic hardship, and how these relationships are resilient to moments of disappointment. At Harvard, she has led sections in early Chinese ethics, happiness, and philosophy of religion, and taught a tutorial on the ethics of belief and testimony. Before coming to Harvard, Yuan received her bachelor's degree in philosophy and chemistry at Mount Holyoke College. 

Edmond J. Safra Undergraduate Fellows 

Joining 21 fellows from previous cohorts

Joel Crawford is a sophomore in Winthrop House concentrating in Government and Philosophy. His interests include moral and political philosophy, and epistemology. Outside of the classroom, Joel is the Internal Relations Chair of the Harvard Undergraduate Legal Committee, the Public Service Chair of the Black Men’s Forum, and the director of the David Walker Scholars mentorship program. In his free time, he can be found watching CSPAN or listening to Jazz music. 

Maddie Dowd is a junior from San Francisco. At Harvard, she lives in Eliot House and concentrates in Philosophy with a secondary in Human Evolutionary Biology. Her intellectual interests include animal ethics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of biology. She plans to focus on our obligations to the more-than-human world and the boundaries of moral consideration. Outside of class, Maddie is writing the script for the Hasty Pudding Theatricals’ 175th show and is a member of the Harvard Lampoon literature staff. 

Emily Feng is a junior in Winthrop studying Philosophy and Economics. At present, she is interested in how we fix the concept of justice, the obligations incurred by the educational sector (specifically, tertiary institutions) in a non-ideal world, and divisions of complex/menial labor in different economic systems. Outside of class, Emily leads tours at the Harvard Art Museums (including one about notions of morality/the good life), directs research at the Harvard Undergraduate Think Tank, and teaches English through PBHA’s Chinatown ESL Program. She is also a fan of investigative journalism, the New York Times ethicist, social deduction games, and peanut butter. 

Maibritt Henkel is a junior double concentrating in Economics and Social Studies. She is interested in issues related to socioeconomic inequality and the systems of redistribution that may or may not address them. As the co-founder of Harvard Rethinking Economics, she hopes to apply the tools of economics in impactful, innovative, and interdisciplinary ways. Maibritt is also enthusiastic about bikes and books and thinks the good life involves a lot of both. Currently, she is the research assistant of Dr. Rich Benjamin at the Radcliffe Institute, working on the project: The Heterosexuals and Money. 

Hugo Hinze is a sophomore concentrating in Social Studies. Originally from the southwest of Germany, he now lives in Winthrop House. He is interested in the relationship between culture, art, and ethics, as well as the ethics and aesthetics of technology. Besides serving as the Art Editor for the Harvard Advocate, Hugo is involved in on-campus theater productions as a stage manager. Otherwise, he can usually be found in a coffee shop with a book in his hands. 

Ryan Jung is a sophomore in Cabot House from Irvine, California studying social studies and philosophy. He is broadly interested in theories of justice, pre-college ethics education, and political legitimacy. Outside of class, Ryan leads CIVICS, a club that trains students to teach civics to fifth-graders in the greater Boston area, and serves on the board of Harvard Model Congress. In his free time, he enjoys powerlifting and rummaging through secondhand shops. 

Lauren Alexes Kirkpatrick is a sophomore in Mather, concentrating in philosophy with a secondary in government. The ironically unjust nature of our justice system is at the heart of her interest in ethics. She believes that there is an inseparability between the law and ethics, an inseparability she owes her life to investigating. Outside of class, she is a writing tutor at the Harvard College Writing Center, and she is a member of The Harvard Crimson’s editorial board. She enjoys listening to NPR Tiny Desk Concerts while propagating her houseplants. 

Ari Kohn is a sophomore in Leverett House concentrating in Social Studies, with a focus on International Political Economy. She is particularly interested in studying the dynamics between capitalism and democracy around the world, and the dangers facing society when ideals and interests do not align. She is also interested in how the ethical character of countries are developed and sustained. Outside of class, Ari is the student co-Chair of Intellectual Vitality initiatives, helping to foster civil discourse and academic freedom among undergraduates. She is a classically-trained singer and ballerina, and enjoys conducting and composing for ensembles. Ari is a teaching fellow in the Statistics department and serves as the Deputy Chair of the IOP’s Women’s Initiative in Leadership. 

Paz Meyers is a junior in Dunster House double concentrating in Molecular & Cellular Biology and Philosophy. He’s particularly interested in how our empirical understanding of cognition and philosophical concepts of mind intersect, and in the metaphysical and ethical implications of neuroregenerative medicine, brain-computer interface technology, and artificial intelligences. Outside of the classroom, Paz has played cello with the Bach Society Orchestra and Mather Chamber Program, reported on scientific research for The Harvard Crimson, and contributed to the development of CRISPR-based molecular diagnostics at the Broad Institute. He also volunteers at the MGH Revere Healthcare Center, co-chairs the Dunster House Committee, and works as a peer tutor with the Academic Resource Center. In his free time, he enjoys running, spending time with family, and trying new restaurants. 

Balqies Mohamed is a sophomore in Dunster House studying Government and Philosophy. Her interests include theories of punishment and abolition literature. She is involved in the Ethics Society as a competing member of the Ethics Bowl and a Phillips Brooks House Association volunteer. In her free time, she can be found enjoying good food with her family. 

Adelaide Parker is a sophomore in Mather House concentrating in Social Studies with a secondary in English. She’s interested in social theory and comparative politics and hopes to use the Fellowship to study how our moral norms shape our systems of governance (and vice versa). Outside of class, Adelaide is a reporter for The Harvard Crimson and an editor for The Crimson’smagazine. When she’s not writing, you can find Adelaide biking, watching Better Call Saul, or working toward earning her language citation in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. 

Maya Rosen is a junior in Winthrop House concentrating in Social Studies and History of Science. She is interested in questions surrounding the creation of a just global society and what responsibilities state and non-state actors carry. Specifically, Maya is interested in the ethics of science and technology as they relate to global health and humanitarian aid efforts. Outside of class, Maya enjoys spending time in Harvard’s outdoors community, reading and editing histories of science, and finding thought-provoking conversations wherever they may be.