Faculty Advisory Board

Richard Kraut, Brady Program Director

Weinberg College, Philosophy

Charles and Emma Morrison Professor in the Humanities. Ph.D. Princeton University. His interests include contemporary moral and political philosophy, as well as the ethics and political thought of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. He is the author of Against Absolute Goodness (Oxford: 2011) and What is Good and Why: The Ethics of Well-Being (Harvard, 2007). His historical studies include Socrates and the State (Princeton: 1984), Aristotle on the Human Good (Princeton: 1989), Aristotle Politics Books VII and VIII , translation with commentary (Clarendon: 1997), Aristotle: Political Philosophy (Oxford: 2002), and How to Read Plato (Granta: 2008). He is the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Plato (1992), Plato's Republic: Critical Essays (Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), and the Blackwell Guide to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (2006). He served as President of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association in 1993-4, and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Center for Hellenic Studies. He served from 2002 to 2004 as the Vice-Chair of the Board of Officers of the American Philosophical Association. In 2006 he became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received the Starr Fellowship of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University, for 2008-09.

Sandy Goldberg, Professor

Weinberg College, Philosophy

Sandy Goldberg (PhD Columbia University, 1995) works in the areas of Epistemology and the Philosophy of Mind and Language. Goldberg’s interests in Epistemology include such topics as reliabilism, the epistemology of testimony, the internalism/externalism dispute, self-knowledge, and skepticism. In the Philosophy of Mind and Language, his interests center on the individuation of the propositional attitudes, externalist theories of mental content and linguistic meaning, and the semantics of speech and attitude reports. A good sample of his work can be found in his two recent books, Anti-Individualism (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Relying on Others (Oxford University Press, 2010).

Adam Goodman, Director

Center for Leadership

Mark Sheldon, Distinguished Senior Lecturer

Weinberg College, Philosophy

Assistant Dean at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, Distinguished Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and also in the Medical Ethics and Humanities Program, Feinberg School of Medicine. He received his PhD from Brandeis University, where he was awarded a Sachar Fellowship to study at Oxford University. He has served as Adjunct Senior Scholar at the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago, and Senior Policy Analyst at the American Medical Association. Formerly Professor of Philosophy and Adjunct Professor of Medicine at Indiana University (Northwest campus) and Indiana University School of Medicine, he currently serves as adjunct faculty at the Neiswanger Institute for Bioethics and Health Policy at Loyola University Stritch School of Medicine and adjunct faculty and ethicist at Rush-Presbyterian-St.Luke's Medical Center in Chicago. Sheldon has published and presented talks on a variety of issues including informed consent, confidentiality, the forced transfusion of children of Jehovah's Witnesses, children as organ donors, disclosure, and the use of Nazi research. He has contributed book chapters and published in a variety of journals including The Journal of the American Medical Association, The Hastings Center Report, The Philosophical Forum, The Journal of Value Inquiry, and The New England Journal of Medicine. He has served as guest editor of two journals - Theoretical Ethics and Bioethics and The Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics. He has served a three-year term as a member of the Committee on Philosophy and Medicine of the American Philosophical Association, and is currently co-editor of the APA Newsletter on Philosophy and Medicine. He also served as a member of the Task Force on Genetics for the Illinois Humanities Council. The focus of his research is the point at which the interests of children, the prerogatives of parents, and the obligations of the state often come into conflict in relation to medical decisions for children.

Cristina Traina, Professor of Religion

Weinberg College, Department of Religious Studies

Cristina L. H. Traina is a student of Christian theology and ethics, with emphasis on Roman Catholic and feminist thought. She received her Ph.D. in theology from the University of Chicago Divinity School and has been a member of the Department of Religious Studies since 1992. Areas of special interest include childhood; the ethics of touch in relations between unequals; sexuality and reproduction; ecology; justice issues in bioethics; economic and immigration justice; and method.  Traina favors an interdisciplinary approach to ethics, drawing on research in philosophy, anthropology, psychology, history, and other fields.

She is the author of Natural Law and Feminist Ethics: the End of the Anathemas (Georgetown 1999). Her monograph The Sensual Mother: Maternal Experience and the Boundaries of Sexual Ethics, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in 2010. Other recent projects include work on the history of popular American Catholic views of the connection between marriage and sexuality and collaborative interdisciplinary research on religion and assisted reproduction, as well as work on the ethics of American economic dependence on low-wage domestic and foreign labor. Her current work focuses on the moral agency and economic and labor rights of children.

Laurie Zoloth, Professor of Religion

Weinberg College, Department of Religious Studies

Laurie Zoloth, a Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence, is Founding Director of Brady Program in Ethics and Civic Life at Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University, and was the director of The Center for Bioethics, Science and Society at Northwestern University`s Feinberg School of Medicine.  She teaches in the Medical Humanities and Bioethics Program, in the Jewish Studies program, and as Professor of Religious Studies.  

From 1995-2003 she was a founder and Director of the Program in Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University.  In 2011, she was elected President of the American Academy of Religion.  In 2001 she was the President of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, a two term member of its founding board, receiving its Distinguished Service Award in 2007. She was a founder and vice president of the Society for Jewish Ethics and is a current board member. She was elected to the National Recombinant DNA Advisory Board in 2012. She served for two terms as member of the NASA National Advisory Council, the nation's highest civilian advisory board for NASA, for which she received the NASA National Public Service Award in 2005, the Executive Committee of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, and she was the founding Chair of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Bioethics Advisory Board.  She has also been on the founding national boards of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanites, the International Society for Stem Cell Research, The Society for Scriptural Reasoning, and NASA’s International Planetary Protection Advisory Committee, and was recently appointed to the ethics board for the American Society of Reproductive Medicine.  In 2005 she was honored as the Graduate Theological Union’s alumna of the year, and in 2009 she received Northwestern University`s most distinguished award for teaching. In 2011, she was named to the City of Evanston Environmental Board.  

Her book, Health Care and The Ethics of Encounter, on justice, health policy, and the ethics of community, was published in 1999.  She is also co-editor of four books, Notes From a Narrow Ridge: Religion and Bioethics, with Dena Davis; Margin of Error: The Ethics of Mistakes in Medicine, with Susan Rubin; The Human Embryonic Stem Cell Debate: Ethics, Religion and Policy, with Karen LeBacqz and Suzanne Holland; and Oncofertility: Ethical, Legal, Social and Medical Perspectives, published in 2010, with Teresa Woodruff, Lisa Campo-Edelstein, and Sarah Rodriquez.