Speaker Biographies
Elizabeth Brake is a Professor of Philosophy at Rice University, and has previously held a Canadian SSHRC grant and a Murphy Institute Fellowship at Tulane. Her research is in ethics, political philosophy, and feminist philosophy. I have written on topics such as love, sex, marriage, amatonormativity – the presumption that everyone is better off in an exclusive, romantic, long-term coupled relationship – procreative ethics and, most recently, disaster ethics – especially, the state’s role in disaster response. She has published work in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics, Ethics, Social Theory and Practice and Ethical Theory and Moral Practice. Her 2012 book Minimizing Marriage (Oxford University Press) won Honorable Mention for the American Philosophical Association Book Prize in 2014. In 2022, she has co-organized, with Kimberley Brownlee (UBC), a virtual lecture series on social human rights and personal relationship goods. Her work has been discussed in the Washington Post, New York Times, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, the Times of India, Haaretz, Il Sole 24 Ore (in Italy), and The Times (London). She is also the Editor of the Journal of Applied Philosophy and is on the Editorial Board of Ethics.
Nicolas Delalande is Associate Professor at the Centre for History at Sciences Po. He holds an Habilitation Thesis (2018, EHESS) and supervises PhDs in political, economic, and social history. His research focuses on the history of the State, inequalities, and solidarities in Europe over the 19th and 20th centuries.
In 2019, he published La Lutte et l’Entraide. L’âge des solidarités ouvrières (Paris, Seuil, 2019, to be translated in English in 2022), an inquiry into the history of international working-class solidarities since the creation of the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864. Beforehand, he had worked on the history of consent and resistances to taxation (Les Batailles de l’impôt. Consentement et résistances de 1789 à nos jours, Paris, Seuil, 2011 and 2014). At Sciences Po, he convenes the general seminar of the Centre for History and, with Alain Chatriot, a reading and interdisciplinary seminar on the State. He teaches on 19th century European history (“Révolutions, empires et nations”, 1st year lecture), the social uses of the past (“Récits, représentations et usages du passé”, 2nd year lecture, major “Humanités politiques”), the history of capitalism, and recent historiographical debates.
He is a chief-editor at La Vie des Idées, and a member of several editorial boards (French Historical Studies, La Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle, Histoire@Politique and Gouvernement et Action publique) . Together with Claire Andrieu and Sylvie Thénault, he is in charge of the History series at Presses de Sciences Po.
Laura Frader is professor emeritus at Northeastern University. She specializes in French social history and European women’s and gender history and has written extensively on these topics. Her publications include Peasants and Protest: Agricultural Workers, Politics and Unions in the Aude, 1850-1914 (University of California Press, 1991); Gender and Class in Modern Europe (co-edited with Sonya O. Rose, Cornell University Press, 1996), Race in France: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Difference (co-edited with Herrick Chapman, Berghahn, 2004); The Industrial Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2006); and Breadwinners and Citizens: Gender in the Making of the French Social Model (Duke University Press, 2008) as well as many articles in English and French-language books and journals. She has served on the editorial boards of The Journal of Modern History and French Historical Studies, and currently serves on the editorial board of French Politics, Culture, and Society and on the editorial board of Signs: Journal of Women, Culture and Society. Frader’s research focuses on the historical and cultural foundations of social inequality, particularly gender inequality. A current project focuses on the history of gender equality policies of the European community since the Treaty of Rome (1957) and their impacts on member states. A second project examines the place of gender and racial difference in French colonial thinking and practice. Frader is a local affiliate at the Minda de Gunzberg Center for European Studies (CES) at Harvard University, where she is co-chair of the European Politics Seminar.
Mark Goodale holds a chair at the University of Lausanne, where he is Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology and former Director of the Laboratory of Cultural and Social Anthropology (LACS). Before moving to Switzerland in 2014, he held teaching positions at George Mason University, where he was Professor of Conflict Analysis and Anthropology, and Emory University, where he served as the first Marjorie Shostak Distinguished Lecturer in Anthropology. He currently directs a four-year research project (2019-2023) on lithium industrialization, energy materialities, and green energy politics, with a focus on Bolivia, financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation. He is the founding Series Editor of Stanford Studies in Human Rights, a leading collection in the field that has published (to-date) 26 volumes, four of which have won major book prizes. He is the recipient of the 2017 International Geneva Award and his writings have appeared in both disciplinary and interdisciplinary journals, including Current Anthropology, American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Law and Society Review, and Law and Social Inquiry, among others. Apart from his academic work, his essays have been published in more general outlets, including Boston Review and The Paris Review. He is the author, editor, or coeditor of fifteen books, including, most recently, A Revolution in Fragments: Traversing Scales of Justice, Ideology, and Practice in Bolivia (Duke University Press 2019), The Oxford Handbook of Law and Anthropology (Oxford University Press 2021), and Reinventing Human Rights (Stanford University Press 2022).
Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. He has written several books in his fields of European intellectual history and human rights history, including The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010), and edited or coedited a number of others. His most recent books are Christian Human Rights (2015), based on Mellon Distinguished Lectures at the University of Pennsylvania in fall 2014, and Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (2018). His newest book is Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021). Over the years he has written in venues such as Boston Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Dissent, The Nation, The New Republic, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.
Henry Shue is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for International Studies [CIS] of the Department of Politics and International Relations, Professor Emeritus of Politics and International Relations, and Senior Research Fellow Emeritus at Merton. Shue is best-known for his book, Basic Rights, first published in 1980, and for pioneering the sub-field of International Normative Theory. His research has focused on the role of human rights, especially economic rights, in international affairs and, more generally, on institutions to protect the vulnerable. Specifically, his writing has focused on the issues of justice arising in international negotiations over climate change and on war, most especially relating to justifications for pre-emption, and the conduct of war, especially the bombing of ‘dual-use’ infrastructure like electricity-generating facilities. Most of his work on climate change can be found in Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection (Oxford 2014), and most of the writing on violence appears in Fighting Hurt: Rule and Exception in Torture and War (Oxford 2016). Most recently, Shue has been working on explanations for the urgency of far more ambitious policies to eliminate fossil fuels in order to avoid irreversible damage to future generations. His work on this topic can be found in his 2021 book The Pivotal Generation: Why We Have a Moral Responsibility to Slow Climate Change Right Now.
Jesse Tomalty is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bergen, Norway, where she teaches on ethics and moral philosophy. Her research focuses on normative and conceptual issues related to global justice and human rights, including socio-economic human rights, global poverty, the ethics of immigration, and labour rights. She has published in The Journal of Applied Philosophy, Ethical Perspectives and Canadian Journal of Philosophy. She is currently co-editing the Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Human Rights with Kerri Woods.
Editors – Being Social
Kimberley Brownlee holds a Canada Research Chair in Ethics and Political and Social Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. Her current work focuses on social rights, loneliness, belonging, and freedom of association. She is the author of Being Sure of Each Other: An Essay on Social Rights and Freedoms (Oxford University Press, 2020) and Conscience and Conviction: The Case for Civil Disobedience (Oxford University Press, 2012), and co-editor of the Blackwell Companion to Applied Philosophy (Wiley, 2016) and Disability and Disadvantage (Oxford University Press, 2009).
David Jenkins is a Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Otago, Aotearoa, New Zealand. Between 2017 and 2020, he was a Leverhulme Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Warwick, and before that the Krzysztof Michalski Junior Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna. He has published work on unconditional basic income, the politics of the public space in India, homelessness, James Baldwin and recognition, homelessness, structural injustice, and work.
Adam Neal is an Early Career Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Warwick, where he also teaches a variety of modules including Introduction to Philosophy, Ethics, Applied Ethics and Principles of Political Economy. His Leverhulme Trust funded PhD thesis concerns the social and interpersonal implications of poverty and understanding poverty using the capability approach. He has co-edited a collection on social rights published with Oxford University Press, as well as published on the impact of the UK Government’s COVID-19 response on people who live alone. He has forthcoming publications on the philosophy of work and the ethics of relationships. He has also lectured on the Ethics of Sociability, and is a member of the Centre for Ethics, Law and Public Affairs.
Editors – Social Rights and the Politics of Obligation in History
Steven L. B. Jensen is a Senior Researcher at The Danish Institute for Human Rights who specializes in the historical evolution of international human rights, human rights diplomacy as well as global health and human rights. Before joining the Danish Institute in 2007, he held positions with the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and with UNAIDS based in Geneva. He holds a PhD in History from the University of Copenhagen and is the author of The Making of International Human Rights. The 1960s, Decolonization and the Reconstruction of Global Values which in 2017 was awarded the prizes both for Best Book on Human Rights and Best Book on International Organisation from the International Studies Association. The book offers a new interpretation of the evolution of international human rights after 1945. Prior to the publication of Social Rights and the Politics of Obligation in History, his most recent publications was a co-edited volume Histories of Global Inequality: New Perspectives (Palgrave Macmillan 2019). He has also published on topics such as HIV/AIDS, the Sustainable Development Goals and on the work of national human rights institutions. He was a Visiting Researcher at Yale Law School in 2011 and at Oxford (History Faculty) in 2016.
Charles Walton is an historian of France and Director of the Early Modern and Eighteenth Century Centre. Before joining the History Department at Warwick, he taught at Yale University, the University of Oklahoma (Norman) and Sciences Po (Paris). His research focuses on Ancien Régime, Enlightenment and Revolutionary France, with emphases on rights, political economy and socio-economic justice. He held a fellowship at the Institut d’Études Avancées (Paris) in Paris for the academic year 2015-16. His 2009 book, Policing Public Opinion in the French Revolution: the Culture of Calumny and the Problem of Free Speech explores the themes of honour, speech, public opinion and political violence, won the Gaddis Smith Prize at Yale. It shows how debates over limits to free expression contributed to political radicalisation before and during the Revolution. He has edited a collection of essays in honour of Robert Darnton on print culture and the Enlightenment, Into Print: Limits and Legacies of the Enlightenment (2011). His most recent book (edited with Steven Jensen) Social Rights and the Politics of Obligation in History (2022) explores the long-neglected history of social rights, debunking the myth that social rights only appeared after World War II as additions to an older rights corpus stretching back to the Enlightenment.