Michele Moody-Adams

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 an Associate Dean. She has published articles on democracy and disagreement, equality and social justice, moral psychology and the virtues, and theories of gender and race. She is the author of a widely cited book on moral relativism, Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture and Philosophy (Harvard UP, 2002). Her current work includes articles on academic freedom, moral progress, and equal educational opportunity. She is at work on a book, Renewing Democracy, on the political institutions and political culture essential for justice and stability in multicultural democracies. Moody-Adams has a BA from Wellesley College, a second BA from the University of Oxford, and earned the MA and PhD in Philosophy from Harvard University. She has been a British Marshall Scholar, an NEH Fellow, and is a lifetime Honorary Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford.