PPE Seminar welcomes Bernardo Zacka, MIT who will present his paper “Silenced by Design: The Interior Architecture of the Welfare State”. Professor Zacka’s main fields of research are contemporary political theory, bureaucracy, ethnographic methods, architecture and politics, 20th century European political thought.

PPE Seminar welcomes Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve, Brown University who will present her paper “The Criminal Justice System as a Welfare Handout: How Criminal Justice Professionals Adapt Welfare-Dependency Narratives To The World of Custody and Courts”. Professor Gonzalez Van Cleve’s research addresses the equitability of laws, the creation of racial meaning, and the “consumer experience” of criminal justice institutions. 

PPE Seminar welcomes Joshua Preiss, Minnesota State University who will present his paper “Just Work for All: The American Dream in the 21st Century”. Professor Preiss’s research is in social and political philosophy, political economy, applied ethics, and the philosophy of economics. 

PPE Seminar welcomes Krisztina Orban, NBER who will present her paper “The Inception of Capitalism Through the Lens of Firms”. Professor Orban’s main fields of research are in Industrial Organization (Productivity), Growth & Development, and Corporate Finance. 

PPE Seminar welcomes Vesla Weaver, Johns Hopkins University who will present her paper “Racial Authoritarianism”. Professor Weaver’s research addresses racial inequality, colorism in the United States, the causes and consequences of the dramatic rise in prisons, and the consequences of rising economic polarization.

PPE Seminar welcomes Robin Douglass, King’s College London who will present his paper “Bernard Mandeville on Pride, Hypocrisy and Sociability”. Professor Douglass’s research expertise is in the history of modern political thought and he is especially interested in how interpretations of historical thinkers continue to influence and structure debates in contemporary political philosophy. 

PPE Seminar welcomes Catherine Herfeld, University of Zurich. Professor Zurich’s researches topics in philosophy and history of science, with a focus on the social sciences and on economics.