Who We are

Dr. Casarella’s primary field of study is systematic theology followed by world religions and world church. He was appointed to the faculty of Duke Divinity School as of July 1, 2020. Formerly, he was an associate professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame from 2013-2020 and served as director of the Latin American North American Church Concerns (LANACC) project in the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. He served as professor of Catholic Studies from 2007-2013 at DePaul University, where he was also the founding director of the Center for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology. He has published ninety-one essays in scholarly journals or books on a variety of topics including medieval Christian Neoplatonism, contemporary theological aesthetics, intercultural thought, and the Hispanic/Latino presence in the U.S. Catholic Church. He served as president of The American Cusanus Society, The Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians in the U.S. (ACHTUS), and the Academy of Catholic Theologians (ACT). He is currently serving a second five-year term on the International Roman Catholic-Baptist World Alliance Ecumenical Dialogue and served also on the Roman Catholic-World Communion of Reformed Churches Dialogue.

He has published a monograph, Word as Bread: Language and Theology in Nicholas of Cusa (2017) and a collection of his own essays, Reverberations of the Word: Wounded Beauty in Global Catholicism (2020). He has also edited or co-edited: Cuerpo de Cristo: The Hispanic Presence in the U.S. Catholic Church (1998), Christian Spirituality and the Culture of Modernity: The Thought of Louis Dupré (1998), Cusanus: The Legacy of Learned Ignorance (2006), A World for All? Global Civil Society in Political Theory and Trinitarian Theology (2011), and, most recently, The Whole is Greater than its Parts: Ecumenism and Inter-religious Encounters in the Age of Pope Francis (2020). He is currently working on a book titled: The God of the People: A Latinx Theology.

Read her "Good Question"  -   Should healthy minor children be used as organ donors for their ill siblings?

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919-613-7075

Farr Curlin is a hospice and palliative care physician who joined Duke University in January 2014. He holds joint appointments in the School of Medicine, including its Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities & History of Medicine, and in Duke Divinity School, including its Initiative on Theology, Medicine and Culture. He works with Duke colleagues to foster scholarship, study, and training regarding the intersections of medicine, ethics, and religion.

After graduating from medical school, he completed internal medicine residency training and fellowships in both health services research and clinical ethics at the University of Chicago before joining its faculty in 2003. His empirical research charts the influence of physicians’ moral traditions and commitments, both religious and secular, on physicians’ clinical practices.

As an ethicist, he addresses questions regarding whether and in what ways physicians’ religious commitments ought to shape their clinical practices in a plural democracy.

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919-668-9008
108 Seeley G. Mudd Building
Medical Center Box 3040
Durham, NC 27710

Juliette Duara is a Senior Fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics. Duara’s research interests include investigating the viability of human rights as an ethical system for the 21^st century, comparing U.S. federal and state governmental responses to perceived conflicts between religious freedom and women’s and LGBTQ persons’ rights to equality, as well as probing gendered implications of human rights violations.  Duara’s publications include a book entitled Gender Justice and Proportionality in India:  Comparative Perspectives, published by Routledge in 2018 as part of its “Advances in South Asian Studies” series and an article on “Religious Pluralism, Personal Laws and Gender Equality in Asia:  Their History of Conflict and the Prospects for Accommodation” in the Asian Journal of Comparative Law (2012).  Duara has a BA in History from Whitman College, an MA in Asian Studies from Stanford, a JD from the University of Chicago Law School, and a PhD in Law from the National University of Singapore Faculty of Law.

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919-660-3026
103 East Duke Building
PO Box 90432
Durham, NC 27708

Kay Jowers directs the Just Environments Program, a joint initiative between Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions and the Kenan Institute for Ethics. Her work focuses on bringing scholars, students, and community co-researchers together to understand the structural sources of environmental and climate injustices and challenge the deeply held assumptions that perpetuate them. Through partnerships grounded in research and data justice principles, her collaborations focus on generating research and policy solutions that address the traditional issues of alleviating environmental burdens as well as on creating healthy sustainable communities with access to quality and affordable housing, food, green spaces, utilities, etc. She also co-directs the Environmental Justice Lab, a collaboration with the Duke Economics Department, where students, faculty, and community partners work together to use computational social science methods to study environmental inequality and assess the efficacy of policy solutions. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a JD from Tulane University Law School, and an MSPH in environmental health sciences from Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine.

Alexander Kirshner's research cuts across democratic theory, comparative politics, and constitutional law. His book A Theory of Militant Democracy: The Ethics of Combating Political Extremism investigates the paradoxical ethical dilemmas raised by antidemocratic opposition to democratic government. His current research explores the intellectual history and practice of legitimate opposition and the competition between religious parties in contemporary Egypt and Tunisia. Alex was an undergraduate and doctoral student at Yale, and he completed an MPhil in political thought and intellectual history at Cambridge. He also spent a few years as a management consultant and as a fellow at a foreign policy think-tank in Washington, D.C.

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919-660-4312

140 Science Drive, 204K Gross Hall
Box 90204, Durham, NC 27708

Michael Kliën is a choreographer and artist whose work has been situated
around the world. Widely considered as one of Europe’s most notable thinkers in contemporary choreography
today, he has been commissioned by leading institutions such
as Ballett Frankfurt, Martha Graham Dance Company, New Museum, PS122,
Volksoper Wien, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Hayward Gallery, and ZKM. As
Artistic Director/CEO of Daghdha (2003—2011, Ireland), he developed a distinct
movement aesthetic as well as influential concepts of politically engaged
choreography, performance, and dance. He received a PhD from the Edinburgh
College of Art in 2009 and, as a committed teacher, has been lecturing about his
findings at leading academic and non-academic institutions. After living in Greece
for five years, he became Associate Professor at Duke University (North Carolina)
in 2017 and inaugural director of the MFA in Dance: Embodied Interdisciplinary
Praxis in 2018. In 2019 he founded the Laboratory for Social Choreography.

Kliën’s artistic practice encompasses interdisciplinary thinking,
critical writing, curatorial projects, and, centrally, choreographic works
equally at home in the Performing as well as the Fine Arts. Michael Kliën’s
choreographies are predominantly dance-based works of art, situated in on
stage, galleries or alternative spaces. Increasingly, visual artworks form part of
his choreographic output, yet other creations may act directly upon the social
sphere (Social Choreography). His choreographies for dance are marked by a
highly sophisticated improvisation methodology and the subsequent movement
aesthetic.

Amongst a considerable body of work, Michael Kliën’s seminal
choreographies include Einem for Ballett Frankfurt, Sediments of an Ordinary
Mind for Daghdha Dance Company (Limerick), Choreography for Blackboards for
Hayward Gallery (London), Slattery’s Lamp for IMMA’s (Irish Museum of Modern
Art) permanent collection and State of the Union for New Museum/Martha
Graham Dance Company (New York). Solo-exhibitions include IMMA (Dublin) and
Benaki Museum (Athens).

Adriane Lentz-Smith's interests lie in African American history, twentieth-century United States history, and the history of the U.S. and the world. Her 2009 book Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I looks at the black freedom struggle in the World War I years, with a particular focus on manhood, citizenship, and global encounters. More recently, she has been at work on a book tentatively entitled Afterlives: Sagon Penn, State Violence, and the Twilight of Civil Rights. The book looks at dramatic moments of violent encounters between African Americans and the police to explore the role of violence in sustaining and opposing white supremacy in the two decades following the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. She is also interested in how African Americans engaged the world in the age of Cold War civil rights, and how their participation in the project of U.S. state and empire set the horizons of their freedom struggles.

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919-684-2837

Brett McCarty is a theological ethicist whose work centers on questions of faithful action within healthcare. He holds joint appointments in the Divinity School and the School of Medicine’s Department of Population Health Sciences. He is associate director of the Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative at the Divinity School, and he is also a faculty associate of the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities & History of Medicine. His publications include essays in The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, and the compilation Spirituality and Religion within the Practice of Medicine. His research and teaching interests occur at the intersections of bioethics, political theology, public health, and theological anthropology. His current research projects focus on competing conceptions of agency within the modern hospital, religious responses to the opioid crisis, and historical and contemporary connections between Christian bioethics and political theology.

Eric Mlyn is a Distinguished Faculty Fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics and Lecturer at Duke’s Sanford School for Public Policy. He was the founding Executive Director of DukeEngage and Assistant vice Provost for Civic Engagement. Before that he was the founding director of the Robertson Scholars Program and served on the Political Science Faculty of UNC-Chapel Hill. He is currently the Director of the Certificate in Civic Engagement and Social Change and chairs Duke’s Global Travel Advisory Committee. He collaborates with colleagues across campus on the development and implementation of Project Citizen, which seeks to puts the consideration of citizenship at the center of the Duke experience and the Duke community. His intellectual interests focus on the role of higher education in fostering democracy and working with undergraduates to foster political and civic engagement. He holds a BA in Political Science from Tufts University and PHD in Political Science from the University of Minnesota. During the fall of 2019 he will be a visiting scholar at the Tisch College for Civic Life at Tufts.

Wayne Norman is the Mike and Ruth Mackowski Professor of Ethics in the Kenan Institute for Ethics and the Department of Philosophy at Duke University. He is a political philosopher who also teaches courses in business ethics, sports ethics, and the philosophy of play and humor. His work in political philosophy focuses mostly on the special challenges that arise in multicultural societies where citizens have diverse and overlapping identities and attachments. He has been most interested in states that incorporate more than one people or nation with its own historic homeland (as more than 90% of countries do). He is the author of Negotiating Nationalism: Nation-building, Federalism, and Secession in the Multinational State and co-editor or author of four other books. And he is currently writing a book entitled The Ethical Adversary: How to play fair when you’re playing to win – in sports, business, politics, law, and love. Before arriving at Duke almost 13 years ago he held distinguished professorships at the Université de Montréal and the University of British Columbia.

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919-660-3190
102 West Duke Building
Box 90432
Durham, NC 27708

Dirk Philipsen is Senior Fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University and an Associate Research Professor of Economic History at the Sanford School of Public Policy. His work and teaching is focused on sustainability and the history of capitalism and his most recent research has focused on GDP as the dominant measure of success in U.S. and international economic affairs. His work also includes historical explorations of alternative measures for well-being.

Raised in Germany and educated in both Germany and the United States, he received a BA in economics (College for Economics, Berlin, 1982), an MA in American Studies (John F. Kennedy Institute, Free University Berlin, 1987), and a PhD in American Social and Economic History (Duke University, 1992). He has taught at Duke University, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Virginia State University. For ten years, he served as Director of the Institute for the Study of Race Relations at Virginia State University, which he founded in 1997. In 2001-2002, he served as one of the lead authors in generating a new shared governance constitution for Virginia State University.

Dirk Philipsen has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Franklin Humanities Center at Duke, and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. He has published on the history of modern capitalism, movements for social and economic justice, as well as race and race relations. His first book, We Were the People, chronicles the collapse of communism in East Germany and was published by Duke University Press. Recently, he served as editor and contributor to a volume on Green Business, published by SAGE. His latest work is published by Princeton University Press under the title The Little Big Number – How GDP Came to Rule the World, And What to Do About It (Spring 2015.)

For more information, please visit DirkPhilipsen.com.

[email protected]
919.613.7342
Sanford School of Public Policy
Sanford Bldg Room 114
201 Science Drive
Box 90239
Durham, NC 27708-0239
DirkPhilipsen.com

Charmaine Royal is the Robert O. Keohane Professor of African & African American Studies, Biology, Global Health, and Family Medicine & Community Health at Duke University. She directs the Duke Center on Genomics, Race, Identity, Difference and the Duke Center for Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation.

Dr. Royal’s research, scholarship, and teaching focus on ethical, social, scientific, and clinical implications of human genetics and genomics, particularly issues at the intersection of genetics and "race". Her specific interests and primary areas of work include genetics and genomics in African and African Diaspora populations; sickle cell disease and trait; public and professional perspectives and practices regarding "race", ethnicity, and ancestry; genetic ancestry inference; and genotype-environment interplay. A fundamental aim of her work is to dismantle ideologies and systems of racial hierarchy in science, healthcare, and society. She serves on numerous national and international advisory boards and committees for government agencies, professional organizations, research initiatives, not-for-profit entities, and corporations.

Dr. Royal obtained a bachelor’s degree in microbiology, master’s degree in genetic counseling, and doctorate in human genetics from Howard University. She completed postgraduate training in ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) research and bioethics at the National Human Genome Research Institute of the National Institutes of Health, and in epidemiology and behavioral medicine at Howard University Cancer Center.

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong is the Chauncey Stillman Professor of Practical Ethics in the Department of Philosophy and the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. He has worked on ethics (theoretical, applied, and empirical), philosophy of law, epistemology, philosophy of religion, and informal logic. He has received fellowships from the Harvard Program in Ethics and the Professions, the Princeton Center for Human Values, the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, the Center for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the Australian National University, and the Sage Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Sinnott-Armstrong is co-director of MADLab at the Kenan Institute for Ethics and has served as the co-director of the MacArthur Law and Neuroscience Project and co-investigator at the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics.

[email protected]
919-660-3172
102 West Duke Building
Box 90743
Durham, NC 27708

Sim B. Sitkin is Michael W. Krzyzewski University Professor of Leadership, Professor of Management and Public Policy, and founding Faculty Director of the Fuqua/Coach K Center on Leadership and Ethics (COLE) at the Fuqua School of Business, and Director of the Behavioral Science and Policy Center at Duke University.  Since joining Duke in 1994, he served at various times as Area Head for the Management and Organizations Department, Faculty Director of Fuqua’s Health Sector Management Program, and Academic Director at Duke Corporate Education.

Sitkin’s research focuses on leadership and control systems and their influence on how organizations and their members become more or less capable of change and innovation. He is widely known for his research on the effect of formal and informal organizational control systems and leadership on risk taking, accountability, trust, learning, M&A processes, and innovation.  His research has appeared in a leading academic and practice-oriented journals.  His most recent books are Organizational Control (2010), The Six Domains of Leadership (2016) and Routledge Companion to Trust (2017).  He is President of the Behavioral Science and Policy Association, Founding Editor of Behavioral Science and Policy, Consulting Editor of Science You Can Use, Advisory Board Member of the Journal of Trust Research, and Advisory Board for the Routledge Book Series on Trust, having previously served as Editor of the Academy of Management Annals, Senior Editor of Organization Science and Associate Editor of the Journal of Organizational Behavior. He has extensive consulting and executive education experience with corporations, non-profits, and government organizations worldwide.  In this work, he has focused on strategic leadership, leading and managing change (including mergers and acquisitions), organizational trust, learning and knowledge management, and the design of organizational control systems.

Jesse Summers is the Associate Director of the Purpose Project and an adjunct Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. Previously, he was an Academic Dean in Trinity College.

He received his PhD in Philosophy from UCLA, his MPhil in philosophy from University College London, his BA in philosophy, political science, and French from the University of Kansas, and his sense of humor from a latchkey childhood watching age-inappropriate comedy.

His book Clean Hands? Philosophical Reflections on Scrupulosity, co-authored with fellow Fellow Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, came out from Oxford University Press in 2019.

Charles D. Thompson, Jr. is Professor of the Practice of Cultural Anthropology and the Documentary Arts at Duke University. He holds a Ph.D. in religion and culture from UNC-Chapel Hill, with concentrations in cultural studies and Latin American studies. He also holds an M.S. degree in Agricultural Education from NC A&T State University. His particular interests include farmworkers, immigration, agriculture, Appalachian Studies, land, attachments to place, and pilgrimages worldwide.  His methodologies include oral history, ethnographic writing, documentary filmmaking, and collaborative community activism.

A former farmer, Thompson has worked extensively with laborers within our food system. He has written about farmworkers, and has served as an advisory board member of Student Action with Farmworkers, the Duke Campus Farm, and other Duke food and agriculture initiatives.

Thompson is author or editor of seven books, including Going Over Home: A Search for Rural Justice in an Unsettled Land (2019), Border Odyssey: Traveling the US/Mexico Divide (2015), Spirits of Just Men: Mountaineers, Liquor Bosses, and Lawmen in the Moonshine Capital of the World, and, with Melinda Wiggins, of The Human Cost of Food: Farmworker Lives, Labor, and Advocacy. Thompson is also the producer/director of seven documentary films, including Homeplace Under Fire, Border Crossing 101, Faces of Time, Brother Towns/ Pueblos Hermanos (2010), We Shall Not Be Moved (2008), and The Guestworker (2007). His latest is the 2019 award-winning PBS documentary entitled, Rock Castle Home, the story of a 1930s Appalachian community displaced by the Blue Ridge Parkway that continues to struggle to hold to its roots in the place inhabited by their ancestors. For more information about these and other works, see his website at charliedthompson.com.

Thompson’s current projects include a major Kenan initiative that he directs with colleague Mike Wiley, entitled, “America’s Hallowed Ground.”  The project features artistic responses to American sites of trauma and curriculum guide for grades 7–12, as well as for community groups seeking to respond to the sacred grounds in their communities. Read more about the project here.

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Stephen Vaisey’s research focuses on where people get their ideas about what a “good life” looks like and what it means to be a “good person,” and to determine how this shapes the choices they make. Most generally, he examines why people do the things they do, and figures out the role of culture and cognition in explaining human behavior. He has also conducted research on 1970s communes, religion, and marijuana use, educational overqualification, gene-environment interactions, and the relationship between poverty and educational aspirations, among other topics.

He is director of the Worldview Lab at the Kenan Institute, an interdisciplinary collaborative research group that brings together faculty, postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduate students to work on shared empirical projects. Worldview Lab's main goal is to better understand diversity in values, goals, and worldviews both internationally and within contemporary American society.

Stephen earned a BA in French and a BS in sociology from Brigham Young University, and an MA and PhD in sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

[email protected]
919-660-5635

Norman Wirzba is Gilbert T. Rowe Distinguished Professor of Christian Theology at Duke Divinity School and a Senior Fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics. He pursues research and teaching interests at the intersections of theology, philosophy, ecology, and agrarian and environmental studies. He lectures frequently in Canada and the United States. His work focuses on understanding and promoting practices that can equip both rural and urban church communities to be more faithful and responsible members of creation. Current research is centered on a recovery of the doctrine of creation and a restatement of humanity in terms of its creaturely life.

Professor Wirzba has published The Paradise of God: Renewing Religion in an Ecological Age and Living the Sabbath: Discovering the Rhythms of Rest and Delight. His most recent books are Way of Love: Recovering the Heart of Christianity, From Nature to Creation: A Christian Vision for Understanding and Loving Our World, Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating, and (with Fred Bahnson) Making Peace with the Land: God’s Call to Reconcile with Creation. He also has edited several books, including The Essential Agrarian Reader: The Future of Culture, Community and the Land and The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry.

Professor Wirzba serves as general editor for the book series Culture of the Land: A Series in the New Agrarianism, published by the University Press of Kentucky, and is co-founder and executive committee member of the Society for Continental Philosophy and Theology.

[email protected]
919-660-3496
211A Gray
Duke Divinity School
Box 90967
Durham, NC 27708-0967