Director's Team
Ted Toadvine is Nancy Tuana Director of the Rock Ethics Institute and Associate Professor of Philosophy. He joined Penn State in 2017 after holding the position of Professor of Philosophy and Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon, where he served as Head of Philosophy in 2011-2014. He has held the posts of Visiting Researcher at Kingston University’s Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Resident Scholar at the University of Oregon’s Wayne Morse Center for Law & Politics, Visiting Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at Oberlin College, Robert F. and Evelyn Nelson Wulf Professor in the Humanities at the Oregon Humanities Center, Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Kalamazoo College, and William F. Dietrich Research Fellow in Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University.
Erin Heidt-Forsythe received a PhD in Political Science, with a focus on Women and Politics, from Rutgers University. Her work examines the intersections of gender, political science, and bioethics. Employing mixed quantitative and qualitative methods, she studies US state legislation and policymaking about assisted reproductive technologies. She has published on assisted reproductive technologies, feminist bioethics, and social policy. Her areas of specialization include science, medicine, and health; reproduction and the body; American state politics and policy; interest groups and representation.
Ben joined the Rock Ethics Institute as its Assistant Director in 2017. He does work in political philosophy and applied ethics, with a focus on criminal justice, political ethics, ideal theory, and religion’s role in politics. His research appears in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, the Journal of Applied Philosophy, the European Journal of Political Theory, the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, and other venues.
Current projects include The Ethics of Policing: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, a volume he is co-editing with Eduardo Mendieta, and Apocalypse without God: Apocalyptic Thought, Ideal Politics, and the Limits of Utopian Hope, which examines the relationship between utopian theorizing and apocalyptic thought in political philosophy.