Nussbaum receives DSP appointment

Martha Nussbaum, the Ernst Freund Professor of Law and Ethics in the Law School, the Divinity School and the Philosophy Department, Associate in Classics, has been appointed to a Distinguished Service Professorship.

Nussbaum, an eminent philosopher, has been a member of the faculty since 1995. Her research intertwines ancient texts with current issues and explores what today’s society can learn from such philosophers as Aristotle and the Stoics.

From 1987 through 1993, she was a research advisor to the World Institute for Development Economics Research in Helsinki, Finland, where she worked with Amartya Sen, the 1998 Nobel Prize winner in economics, at forging a philosophical framework to explore economic development issues. She continues that work in her current research.

Nussbaum has received the Literary Lion Award from the New York Public Library, the PEN Spielvogel-Diamondstein Prize for best collection of essays, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for Independent Research. She was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1988.

Nussbaum has chaired the American Philosophical Association’s committee on international cooperation and its committee on the state of women, and she is currently a member of the association’s national board and the incoming president of its central division. She has also served on the board of the American Council of Learned Societies.

Nussbaum has written several books, including Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education, The Fragility of Goodness and Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, which argues that literary imagining illuminates issues in economics, social thought and jurisprudence. She has also edited many books; most recently, she co-edited Clones and Clones: Facts and Fantasies About Human Cloning with Cass Sunstein, the Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor in the Law School. Her new book, Sex and Social Justice, will be out this month.

Nussbaum received her B.A. in 1969 from New York University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1971 and 1975 respectively. She holds honorary degrees from seven colleges and universities in the United States and abroad. She came to Chicago in 1995 from Brown, where she was a university professor. She has been a visiting professor at Wellesley College, Stanford University, Oxford University and University of California at Riverside and has presented named lectures and lecture series at Chicago, Harvard, Northwestern, Yale and the University of Edinburgh among many others.