PPE WELCOMES FIVE NEW FACULTY MEMBERS!
Read more about our new faculty below:
Alexandra Oprea joined the Political Science Department and the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Program in the summer of 2021 as an assistant professor with a specialization in philosophy, politics, and economics. Alex’s research interests include public education, the moral and political status of children, and institutional design. She is currently working on a series of articles investigating the appropriate distribution of education power among local and state governments, teachers’ unions, parents’ associations, non-profits, law courts, and school administrators.
Daniel Muñoz joined the Philosophy Department and the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Program as an assistant professor in the summer of 2021. Before UNC, he was a lecturer (assistant professor) at Monash University, and he studied at UT Austin (BA, 2014) and MIT (PhD, 2019). Daniel’s work mostly counts as “normative ethics,” which means it’s too concrete to be “meta,” but not concrete enough to be useful. He is writing a book called What We Owe to Ourselves, as well as a second book, with Brian Hedden, called Multidimensionality: How Values Combine in Ethics, Economics, and Beyond. He has published papers in other part of philosophy, too — in particular: epistemology, metaphysics, metaethics, and the philosophy of action. You can read Daniel’s papers in such journals as Mind, Noûs, Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, Journal of Philosophy, and Politics, Philosophy & Economics. You can also hear him on the occasional podcast talking about ethics, politics, or video games.
Lucia Schwarz joined the Philosophy Department and the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Program as a teaching assistant professor in the summer of 2021. She received her PhD in Philosophy from the University of Arizona, where she was affiliated with the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom. Before that, she received her BA in Political Science from the University of Regensburg. She specializes in metaethics and applied ethics, but she also has interests in feminist philosophy, political philosophy, and aesthetics.
Sahar Heydari Fard joined the Philosophy Department and the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Program as a teaching assistant professor in the summer of 2021. She has a PhD in Philosophy and a master’s degree in Economics. Her research is about ethical and philosophical questions we can (and should) ask that are related to social movements and social change.
Erik Zhang joined the Philosophy Department and the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Program as a teaching assistant professor in the summer of 2021. He obtained his PhD from Princeton University and his BA from Queen’s University in Canada. Erik’s primary research interests are in normative ethics and practical normativity, including the ethics of interpersonal trade-offs, the ethics of risk-impositions, promissory obligations, the nature of practical reasons, and the structure of normativity.