Martha Nussbaum named 2002 Jeannette K. Watson Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities

Martha Nussbaum named 2002 Jeannette K. Watson Distinguished Visiting Professor in the HumanitiesFebruary 09, 2002Judy Holmesjlholmes@syr.edu

Martha Nussbaum, one of the nation’s leading public intellectuals, will be the 2002 Jeannette K. Watson Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities at Syracuse University. She will present a series of three public lectures and a series of multidisciplinary seminars on campus during the Spring 2002 semester. The program is hosted by the Department of Philosophy in The College of Arts and Sciences.

Nussbaum’s first public lecture will be at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 25 in Watson Auditorium, when she will present “Secret Sewers of Vice: Disgust, Bodies and the Law.” The lecture is free and open to the public. During her February visit to campus, she will also conduct a faculty workshop at the College of Law, a seminar on “Cultivating Humanity” for the School of Education and on “Poetic Justice” for the Department of English in The College of Arts and Sciences, and a discussion with graduate students and faculty in the Maxwell School of Citizenship.

Nussbaum will return to Syracuse in late April to present two additional public lectures and several seminars.

Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago Law School. She also holds appointments in philosophy, divinity, classics, South Asian studies and gender studies. Nussbaum earned a B.A. from New York University in 1969, and a master’s degree and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1971 and 1975, respectively. She has taught at Harvard, Brown and Oxford universities.

From 1986 to 1993, she was a research advisor at the World Institute for Development Economics Research in Helsinki, a part of the United Nations University. She has chaired the Committee on International Cooperation and the Committee on the Status of Women of the American Philosophical Association, has been a member of the association’s National Board, and one of the association’s three presidents during 1999-2000.

She is the author of 10 books, the latest of which is “Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 2001). Her current work in progress includes “Hiding from Humanity: Disgust and Shame in the Law” (the Remarque Lectures delivered at NYU in 2001, under contract to Princeton University Press), and “The Cosmopolitan Tradition (the Castle Lectures delivered at Yale University in 2000 under contract to Yale University Press). This year, she will deliver the Tanner Lectures at the Australian National University in Canberra under the title “Beyond the Social Contract: Toward Global Justice.”

Nussbaum has been a member of the Council of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the Board of the American Council of Learned Societies. She received the Brandeis Creative Arts Award in Non-Fiction in 1990 and the PEN Spielvogel-Diamondstein Award for the best collection of essays in 1991. Her book, “Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education” (1997) won the Ness Book Award from the Association of American Colleges and Universities in 1998, and her book, “Sex and Social Justice” (1998) won the book award of the North American Society for Social Philosophy in 2000. She holds 13 honorary degrees and is a recipient of the 2000 NYU Distinguished Alumni Award.

The Jeannette K. Watson Distinguished Visiting Professorship in the Humanities was established to bring to SU those scholars and writers whose work is of great importance for the humanities. Previous holders of the professorship include David Bohm, Angela Davis, Stephen Greenblatt and Toni Morrison, among others. The professorship was made possible by the generosity of the late Jeannette K. Watson. The opportunities provided by the professorship are consistent with initiatives in the University’s Academic Plan directed at expanding opportunities for multidisciplinary intellectual discourse for students.