Director, Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study
Click here for Meghan Sullivan's CV.
Meghan Sullivan is the Wilsey Family Collegiate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and Director of the NDIAS.
Sullivan’s research tends to focus on philosophical problems concerning time, modality, rational planning, value theory, and religious belief (and sometimes all five at once). She has two books: Time Biases (OUP, 2018) and The Good Life Method (Penguin, 2022 - with Paul Blaschko). She is now writing a book on the role love plays in grounding moral, political, and religious reasoning. It is tentatively entitled Agapism: Moral Responsibility and Our Inner Lives.
Sullivan teaches courses at all levels and founded Notre Dame’s God and the Good Life Program. GGL introduces undergraduates to big philosophical questions concerning happiness, morality, and meaning… and key methods for wrestling with them. In Fall 2019 she team-taught an FTT and Philosophy exploratory seminar about NBC’s The Good Place called The Good Class. Sullivan occasionally teaches gateway seminars like The Examined Life, and specialized graduate seminars on time, modality, philosophical logic, rationality, and value. In Fall 2020, working with campus partners, she launched an interdisciplinary graduate seminar and funded fellowship program within the NDIAS. And with Mark McKenna (ND Technology Ethics Center/Law School) and Ted Chiang (’20-21 NDIAS fellow) she offered a 2020 seminar on Ted Chiang’s fiction and the role of narrative, philosophical, and legal analysis in shaping ethical thinking about technology. In 2021, Sullivan was honored with one of Notre Dame’s Joyce Awards for Teaching and with the Provost’s All-Faculty Team Award.
Sullivan is a co-editor for the journal Nous. She also serves as an Executive Committee Member-At-Large for the American Philosophical Association (Central Division) and is co-chair (with Kenny Easwaran) of the 2023 Central APA Program Committee. She serves on way too many committees and frequently does research with postdocs, graduate, and undergraduate students.
Sullivan has degrees from the University of Virginia (B.A.: Philosophy and Politics, Highest Distinction), Oxford (B.Phil: Philosophy), and Rutgers (Ph.D.: Philosophy). She studied at Oxford as a U.S. Rhodes Scholar (Balliol College).
When not philosophizing or leading the NDIAS, Sullivan enjoys cooking, biking, building elaborate Lego sets, reading science fiction, and traveling the world. She cheers for the Fighting Irish and Virginia Cavaliers in all of their endeavors, and when they play each other she has a rational crisis.