We first offered post doctoral fellowships beginnng in September 2007. Since then, our Center has hosted 11 scholars. Below, meet our past post doctoral fellows.


Sam Arnold (2011-2012)
Sam received his Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton in September, 2011.  His research interests include the liberal tradition, distributive justice, and the place of meaningful work in liberal egalitarian theory.  Sam won a Princeton University Center for Human Values Graduate Prize Fellowship in 2009-2010 and a Quin Morton Teaching Fellowship in 2010-2011.  His work has appeared in the Journal of Political Philosophy.

As a postdoctoral fellow, Sam will work on turning his dissertation into a book manuscript.  He will also begin a new project on equality of opportunity.

Kendra Bischoff (2011-2012)
Kendra, a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellow, completed her Ph.D. in Sociology at Stanford in 2011. Her research focuses on the causes and consequences of racial and economic segregation in neighborhoods and schools, the effect of school context on student outcomes, and civic engagement among disadvantaged youth. Her dissertation examined the academic achievement and social experiences of participants in a school desegregation program.  

While at Stanford, Kendra will revise and expand her dissertation for publication. She looks forward to collaborating on questions pertaining to the intersection of education policy and ethics, especially as they relate to racial and socioeconomic integration in schools.

Tom Dougherty (2010-2012)
Tom did his graduate work at MIT. His dissertation is entitled, “Help! Not Just Anybody. Essays on Altruism and Conflicts of Interest.” It looks at what beneficence requires of us as individuals. His primary research interests are in ethics. His paper, "On Whether to Prefer Pain to Pass" was recently published in Ethics. At the Center, he is teaching the courses, Justice, and Contemporary Moral Problems, and his research will continue to focus on questions concerning our obligations to people in need, as well as ethical issues concerning tense and foundational issues in a theory of rights. In July 2012, he will take up a continuing position at the University of Sydney.

Nicole Hassoun (2009-2010)
Nicole is an assistant professor in philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University. She is affiliated with Carnegie Mellon's Program on International Relations and the Center for Bioethics and Health Law at the University of Pittsburgh.

Nicole writes primarily in political philosophy and ethics and focuses, in particular, on global economic and environmental justice. She is also interested in methodological issues in philosophy and the other social sciences. Her articles appear in journals such as the American Philosophical Quarterly, Public Affairs Quarterly, Environmental Ethics, The American Journal of Bioethics, Journal of Moral Philosophy, and Utilitas.

During her time at Stanford, Nicole plans to extend her research on basic needs and globalization to questions about international trade and population health. She will consider, for instance, what light good ethical principles throw on the World Trade Organization’s Trade Related International Property Rights, Sanitary and Phytosanitary, Technical Barriers to Trade, and (potential) service agreements.

Joseph Mazor (2010-2012)
Joe completed his Ph.D in the interdisciplinary Political Economy and Government Program at Harvard and spent the 09-10 academic year as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton.

In his dissertation, Joe examines the normative foundations of natural resource property rights.  He argues for a more egalitarian global distribution of natural resource wealth and for more robust global institutions to manage common environmental resources.

Joe's primary research interests lie in distributive justice, environmental political theory, and deliberative democracy. During his time at Stanford, Joe plans to prepare his dissertation for publication and to work on new research projects on public goods and fair prices.

Brad McHose (2007-2009)
Brad got his Ph.D. at UCLA and works on contemporary issues in distributive justice. In his dissertation, Egalitarianism, Permissible Partiality and Decency, he examines the clash between arguments for egalitarian norms and the widespread belief that, barring cases of dire need, people are generally not morally responsible for promoting other persons’ interests.

Brad is currently working on an argument according to which decency generally requires that well off persons, when making mutually advantageous exchanges involving the working poor, cede the bulk of the surplus benefits of such exchanges to the poor, even if they are not in dire need.

Allegra McLeod (2009-2010)
Allegra received her Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford and her J.D. from Yale Law School. After law school, Allegra clerked for the Honorable M. Margaret McKeown of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and served as an Arthur Liman Public Interest Fellow providing pro bono representation to immigrants detained at the California-Mexico border. As a Liman Fellow, Allegra also conducted research on the intersections of U.S. criminal and immigration policies. 

Allegra’s Ph.D. dissertation, entitled "Exporting U.S. Criminal Justice: Crime, Development, and Empire After the Cold War," addressed the globalization of U.S. criminal procedural and transnational crime control models. In her dissertation, she systematically examined the range of U.S. government programs engaged in foreign criminal justice reform, the functions these programs fulfilled in terms of fashioning a regime for global governance and neoliberal restructuring during the 1990s and beyond, and their not infrequently devastating effects on the ground in recipient locations. 

As a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford, Allegra will work to revise and publish her dissertation manuscript, and will continue her research on the criminalization of migration policy and criminal justice and development. She will split her time between the Program on Global Justice and Center for Ethics in Society and will co-teach the course Introduction to Global Justice.

Kieran Oberman (2009-2011)
Kieran completed his PhD at Oxford University.  His thesis, "Immigration and Freedom of Movement," argued that people have a human right to freedom of movement that entails a right to cross international borders. He thus concluded that immigration restrictions could not be justified outside of emergency situations.  

In his post-doctoral work, Kieran is continuing to focus on the ethical issues surrounding international migration.  While at Stanford he has completed an article, "Immigration, Global Poverty and the Right to Stay", that argues against using migration as a means to address the problem of global poverty.  The article is forthcoming in Political Studies. He has also written an article exploring the question of whether the brain drain of skilled workers from poor states could justify the imposition of immigration restrictions.  He is now working on a publication, based upon his dissertation, entitled "Immigration as a Human Right

Avia Pasternak  (2007-2009)
Avia's current post-doc position is divided between the Program in Ethics in Society and the Program in Global Justice. Her research interests concern the global responsibilities of liberal democracies; the notion of collective responsibility; the scope of democratic civic duties and the nature of democracy.

Avia wrote her D.Phil. thesis at Nuffield College, Oxford University. The title of the thesis is Civic Responsibility in the Face of Injustice. The thesis analyzes the ways in which democratic citizens, as individuals and as members of a collective, are responsible for the injustices perpetrated by their governments. A chapter of the thesis, 'Sanctioning Liberal Democracies", is forthcoming in Political Studies.

Avia has been a tutorial fellow at Christ Church College for the last two years, teaching political theory to undergraduates. Before going to Oxford, she completed a B.A. and an M.A. degree at the Department of Political Science, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Jean Thomas (2010-2012)
Jean received her B.A. and an M.A. in English literature from the University of Toronto, where she also completed her J.D. She received her doctoral degree in law, as well as her L.L.M, from New York University. Her main interest is in the area of legal philosophy, and in rights theory in particular. Her doctoral research was grounded in the question of which private actors should, under which circumstances, bear the burdens associated with public law rights. Her dissertation explored the possibility of human rights enforcement in private litigation, and the relationship between human rights and private obligations.

In her post-doctoral work at Stanford, Jean is developing several projects in the area of human rights theory such as human rights in the private sphere, and the relationship between human rights and property rights, as well as in tort theory. She teaches a course called 'Human Rights and Moral Questions,' about the intersection between human rights and ethical issues such as cultural diversity and democratic governance. She is also working on a project related to cultural norms in liberal society.

Zofia Stemplowska  (2008-2009)
Zofia is at Stanford on leave from the University of Manchester where she is a Lecturer in Political Philosophy. She obtained her D.Phil from Nuffield College, Oxford University. Her thesis focused on the concepts of responsibility and luck in contemporary theories of distributive justice.

Zofia has published in Political Studies, Politics, Philosophy & Economics, Social Theory & Practice, and is the co-editor (with Carl Knight) of a book on distributive justice and responsibility forthcoming with Oxford University Press. While at Stanford, Zofia will work on responsibility and distributive justice (both domestic and global), as well as on the relationship between so-called ideal and non-ideal theory.