About

Michele Moody-Adams is Joseph Straus Professor of Political Philosophy and Legal Theory at Columbia University, where she served as Dean of Columbia College and Vice President for Undergraduate Education from 2009-2011. Before Columbia, she taught at Cornell University, where she was Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and Director of the Program on Ethics and Public Life. She has also taught at Wellesley College, the University of Rochester, and Indiana University, where she served as Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education. 

She has published on equality and social justice, moral psychology and the virtues, moral objectivity and moral relativism, and the philosophical implications of gender and race.  She is the author of Making Space for Justice: Social Movements, Collective Imagination and Political Hope, published in 2022.  She is also the author of a widely cited book on moral relativism, Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture and Philosophy, and a co-author on the multi-author work Against Happiness (May 2023).  Her current work also includes articles on academic freedom, equal educational opportunity, democratic disagreement, and what constitutes an epistemically and morally defensible understanding of history. She is currently working on a book length-project on Reclaiming the Idea of ‘the Human,’ and book entitled Renewing Democracy. A special focus of her work on democracy is the connection between democracy and the civic art and architecture of remembrance.

Moody-Adams has a B.A. from Wellesley College, a second B.A. from Oxford University, and earned the M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard University. She has been a British Marshall Scholar, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, and is a lifetime Honorary Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford. She is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.