Faculty Fellow
2026-2027 Brady Faculty Fellow
The Brady Faculty Fellow is part of a team of Northwestern faculty and graduate students who work closely with Brady undergraduates. The Fellow participates in the intellectual and social life of the Brady Program, and devotes time to the development of a new undergraduate course, or the revision of an already existing course, whose content is related to the goals and values of the Brady Scholars Program. These include the exploration of ethical and political issues, community service, domestic and international citizenship.
The Brady Faculty Fellow for 2026-2027 is Yvonne Tam
Yvonne Tam finished her PhD at University of California Riverside in 2025 and works in moral theory and its history, with a focus on Kant’s practical philosophy. She is currently working on a moral conception of radical self-love and articulating its deep ties to friendship, solidarity, and moral agency.
Brady Faculty Fellow 2023-2026, Rowan Mellor
Assistant Professor, Trinity College, Dublin
Rowan works on issues in moral and political philosophy. Right now, he is mainly thinking about group obligation and joint deliberation.
Previously, Rowan was a Leverhulme postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, and an associate lecturer in political philosophy at University College London.
Rowan completed his PhD in Philosophy at UCL 2021. His dissertation was about the responsibilities which individuals bear in the face of structural injustice. Personal website
Brady Faculty Fellow 2023-2025 Libby Southgate,
Assistant Professor, Franklin & Marshall College
Libby’s research is mostly at the intersection of ethics and epistemology. Libby also does research in philosophy of education. Much of Libby’s work concerns (in one way or another) the phenomenon of intractable moral disagreement.
Libby received her Ph.D. from Cornell University in 2023 with a dissertation entitled “Papers Concerning Moral Disagreement”. Libby was a Postdoctoral Faculty Fellow in the Brady Program in Ethics and Civic Life at Northwestern University, 2023-2025. Personal Website
Brady Faculty Fellow 2020-2023 Laura Martin,
University of Chicago, Collegiate Assistant Professor, Society of Fellows
The question that guides Laura’s work is how oppressive social contexts diminish our freedom without extinguishing the possibility of collective liberation. Drawing on philosophical resources in the work of thinkers like Hegel, Marx, and Beauvoir, she articulates a conception of social freedom and bring it to bear on contemporary debates in feminist philosophy. To this end, Laura has written about the way women’s attempts to actualize autonomy can be thwarted by an oppressive social world, and about how oppressive practices co-opt our desires for status and recognition. Laura’s current projects include an article about the role the public plays in emancipatory social change, and a book project that seeks to recover a robustly social conception of freedom for feminist theory and practice.
Laura received a PhD from Columbia University in 2020, with a dissertation entitled “The Social Ontology of Systemic Oppression”. Before starting her appointment at the University of Chicago in 2023, she taught in the Philosophy Department and the Brady Scholars Program at Northwestern University. Personal Website