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Faculty Type: Faculty Fellows

Stephen Vaisey

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.

vaisey@soc.duke.edu
919-660-5635

David Toole

David Toole is director of the Kenan Institute for Ethics and Associate Professor of the Practice of Theology, Ethics, and Global Health. He earned his PhD at Duke in 1996 and then left for his home state of Montana, where he taught at Carroll College and the University of Montana before returning to Duke in 2005. In 2009, he started traveling back and forth from Duke to communities in the Great Lakes region of East Africa while working on grant projects and conducting research in Burundi, Rwanda, Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, South Sudan and Sudan. His work in Africa led his to pursue an MPH degree from UNC, Chapel Hill, which he completed in 2014. His teaching includes courses on Global Health as an Ethical Enterprise, Ethics and the History of Humanitarianism, Challenges of Living an Ethical Life, and Ethics and Native America. He is the author of Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo: Theological Reflections on Nihilism, Tragedy, and Apocalypse, and has recently completed a manuscript titled The Morgue in the Garden of Eden: An Essay on Hope … in the Dark, which tells the story of a Burundian woman and the hospital she founded during Burundi’s long civil war. David has been married to his wife, Nancy, for thirty-four years and is the father of three grown boys.

dtoole@div.duke.edu

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong

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.

He is the author of Morality Without God? and Moral Skepticisms, editor of Moral Psychology, volumes I-III, and has published articles in a variety of philosophical, scientific, and popular journals and collections. His most recent book, Think Again: How to Reason and Argue, discusses the benefits that sound, fair arguments grounded in mutual understanding can have. His MOOC course of the same name, offered through Coursera, has attracted more than 900,000 registered students from over 150 countries.
Sinnott-Armstrong earned his BA from Amherst College and his PhD from Yale University. His current work is on moral psychology and brain science as well as the uses of neuroscience in legal systems.

ws66@duke.edu
919-660-3172
102 West Duke Building
Box 90743
Durham, NC 27708

Charmaine Royal

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.

Dirk Philipsen

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.

dirk.philipsen@duke.edu
919.613.7342
Sanford School of Public Policy
Sanford Bldg Room 114
201 Science Drive
Box 90239
Durham, NC 27708-0239
DirkPhilipsen.com

Wayne Norman

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.

wayne.norman@duke.edu
919-660-3190
102 West Duke Building
Box 90432
Durham, NC 27708