Nussbaum to join faculty

Nussbaum, currently University Professor at Brown University, was a visiting professor in the Law School in 1994. Her courses -- which will combine traditional philosophy with literature, economics and other social science disciplines -- will focus on classical philosophy, law and literature, moral and political philosophy, and human emotions and their meaning in ethics.

"Martha is a scholar and teacher of the highest caliber, and we look forward to having her back at the Law School," said Douglas Baird, the Harry A. Bigelow Professor and Dean of the Law School. "Her joint appointment continues the great interdisciplinary tradition that flourishes at Chicago."

Nussbaum has written extensively on topics in ancient Greek philosophy, ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, feminism, and philosophy and literature. Her books include Aristotle's De Motu Animalium (1978), The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (1986), Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (1990) and The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (1994). She is the co-editor of Essays on Aristotle's De Anima (with Amelie Rorty, 1992), The Quality of Life (with Amartya Sen, 1993), Passions & Perceptions: Studies in Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind (with Jacques Brunschwig, 1993) and Women, Culture and Development (with Jonathan Glover, 1995).

She received the Brandeis Creative Arts Award for Non-Fiction in 1990, the PEN Spielvogel-Diamondstein Award for best collection of essays in 1991 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1981. Upheavals of Thought: A Theory of the Emotions, the Gifford Lectures she presented at the University of Edinburgh in 1993, will be published in 1997-98. Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination in Public Life, based on the Alexander Rosenthal Lectures she presented at Northwestern in 1991, is scheduled to be published in January 1996.

Nussbaum is currently completing Citizens of the World: A Classical Defense of Radical Reform in Higher Education, a book on curricular controversies in American higher education.

Nussbaum received her B.A. in 1969 from New York University and her M.A. in 1971 and her Ph.D. in 1975 from Harvard. She was on the faculty at Harvard from 1975 to 1983 before joining the faculty at Brown in 1984. From 1987 to 1993, she was a research adviser to the World Institute for Development Economics Research, a division of the United Nations University. She also has held visiting professorships at Wellesley College, Ecole Normal Superieure de Jeunes Filles in Paris and the University of Oslo, Norway.

She is on the board of the American Council of Learned Societies, and she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Association, among many other professional organizations. She is also on the editorial boards of several journals, including Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Philosophy and Literature and Yale Journal of Law and Humanities.