Faculty Advisory Council | Parr Center for Ethics

Faculty Advisory Council

Lois A. Boynton, PhD, Hussman School of Journalism and Media

Lois Boynton is Associate Professor in UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media. She is Public Relations Sequence head and was named to the University’s Academy of Distinguished Teaching Scholars. She won the School’s David Brinkley Teaching Award in spring 2007. Her research focuses on ethical decision-making by public relations practitioners, professionalism and social responsibility. Other research interests include agenda building, persuasion, and nonprofit public relations challenges. She has published works in academic journals, including Communication Yearbook, Public Relations Review, Journalism and Mass Communication Educator, PRism, Journal of Promotion Management and The Successful Professor. She has also co-authored two book chapters, one on ethics and another on successful teaching techniques.

Sreedhari Desai, PhD, Kenan-Flagler Business School

Sreedhari Desai is Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior and Crist W. Blackwell Scholar at the Kenan-Flagler Business School. She researches how individuals behave in organizations, with a focus on ethical decision making, fairness and gender diversity. In her work on ethics, Dr. Desai investigates broadly the role of ethical nudges or non-coercive ways of leading people down moral pathways. In all her projects Dr. Desai relies on carefully designed laboratory experiments paired with real-world data in her exploration of answers. Dr. Desai teaches MBA courses in leadership, management, decision making, and negotiations, and is the faculty chair of the Full Time MBA program. She studies socially charged issues like race, gender, and sexual orientation, and brings these normally undiscussed issues into the MBA classroom. Her goal is to inspire business students to be fearless in tackling important societal issues both inside and outside the classroom.

Eric Muller, JD, School of Law

Eric Muller is the Dan K. Moore Distinguished Professor in Jurisprudence and Ethics in UNC’s School of Law. He is one of the leading scholars of the removal and imprisonment of Japanese Americans in World War II and has published extensively in this field for more than two decades. He is also known for his work on constitutional criminal procedure, the law of slavery, and the Nazi legal system. He has published two monographs, “Free to Die for their Country: The Story of the Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II” (U. of Chicago Press 2001) and “American Inquisition: The Hunt for Japanese American Disloyalty in World War II” (UNC Press 2007), and an edited volume, “Colors of Confinement: Rare Kodachrome Photographs of Japanese American Incarceration in World War II” (UNC Press 2012), which the Western History Association awarded its Joan Kerr Patterson Prize. His articles have appeared in the Yale Law Journal, the Harvard Law Review, and the University of Chicago Law Review, among others. At UNC, Muller has served as the law school’s Associate Dean for Faculty Development and as director of the Center for Faculty Excellence, the faculty development center serving the entire university.

Arlene M. Davis, JD, School of Medicine (Ex Officio)

Arlene M. Davis is an attorney and Professor of Social Medicine, as well as director of the UNC Center for Bioethics. She is also a member of the North Carolina State Bar. Davis’s work focuses on practical ethics in both clinical and research settings, drawing upon her prior experience in private practice and in pediatric and public health nursing. Within the School of Medicine and elsewhere, Davis’s research and teaching explore topics related to bioethics and to health law. Within the School of Medicine she is an active member of the UNC Academy of Educators, Chair of the Student Progress Committee, and has served on several educational committees. In UNC Hospitals, she co-chairs the Hospital Ethics Committee. As director of UNC Hospitals’ Clinical Ethics Service, she conducts or supervises ethics consultations for patients throughout the quaternary hospital system, offers educational programs for GME and hospital staff, and helps develop policy guidance at the intersections of law and ethics.

Lloyd Kramer, PhD, Department of History

Lloyd Kramer is the Director of Carolina Public Humanities and a Professor of History. He joined the UNC faculty in 1986 and has served on the Carolina Public Humanities Faculty Advisory Board, participated in Carolina Public Humanities’ long-range strategic planning, led Executive Seminars on the Humanities at off-campus venues, and directed the History Department’s “Project for Historical Education”—a longtime program of seminars for history teachers in the public schools. He became Director of Carolina Public Humanities in July 2014. He is also a past President of the Faculty at UNC-Chapel Hill. Professor Kramer’s teaching and research focus on Modern European History with an emphasis on nineteenth-century France. He is particularly interested in historical processes that shape cultural identities, including the experiences of cross-cultural exchange and the emergence of modern nationalism.

Matthew Kotzen, PhD, Department of Philosophy (Ex Officio)

Matt Kotzen, Associate Professor of Philosophy, is Chair of UNC’s Department of Philosophy. He joined the Department in 2008 after studies at Harvard (A.B.) and New York University (Ph.D.). He has published scholarly articles in epistemology, formal epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of law, and the philosophy of humor. He is a former Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Term Professor for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, and he received the Ruth and Phillip Hettleman Prize for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement in 2016. He is currently a Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellow, working on a project investigating connections between epistemology and the law of evidence.

Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, PhD, Department of Philosophy

Geoffrey Sayre-McCord is Morehead-Cain Alumni Distinguished Professor of Philosophy. Professor Sayre-McCord works in moral theory, with a special interest in questions of objectivity and justification. Widely published, he has an international reputation that has him regularly going overseas to present his work. A three-time recipient of UNC’s Tanner Award for Teaching Excellence, he is committed not only to undergraduate teaching but also to teaching in the wider community. Some of Professor Sayre-McCord’s publications include: “Criminal Justice and Legal Reparations,” in Philosophical Issues (2001); “On the Relevance of Ignorance to the Demands of Morality,” in Rationality, Rules, and Ideals, edited by Sinnott-Armstrong (2002); “Moral Realism,” in the Oxford Handbook of Moral Theory, edited by Copp (2006); “Sentiments and Spectators: Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Judgment,” in The Philosophy of Adam Smith, edited by Brown and Fleischacker (2010); and “Voting and Causal Responsibility,” with Geoff Brennan, in Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy v. 1, edited by Sobel, Vallentyne, and Wall (2015).

Kimberly Strom, PhD, School of Social Work

Dr. Kim Strom is the Smith P. Theimann Jr. Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Professional Practice at the School of Social Work and the Director of UNC’s Office of Ethics and Policy. Dr. Strom teaches in the areas of direct practice, higher education, and human resource management. Her scholarly interests involve ethics, moral courage, and social work education. She is the former chair of the National Association of Social Workers’ National Committee on Inquiry and is active in training, consultation and research on ethics and social work practice. She has written over 60 articles, monographs and chapters on ethics and practice. She is the author of Straight Talk about Professional Ethics and The Ethics of Practice with Minors: High Stakes and Hard Choices and of the forthcoming text Cultivating Courage. Dr. Strom is also the co-author of the texts Direct Social Work Practice, Teaching Social Work Values and Ethics: A Curriculum Resource, and Best of Boards. Dr. Strom is a past Associate Director of the Academic Leadership Program at the UNC Institute for Arts and Humanities, which helps prepare and support the next generation of UNC academic leaders.

Sarah Stroud, PhD, Department of Philosophy (Ex Officio)

Sarah Stroud has served as Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Parr Center for Ethics since 2018. Before coming to Carolina, Dr. Stroud was a Professor of Philosophy at McGill University, where she taught from 1993 to 2018. She holds degrees from Harvard (A.B.) and Princeton (Ph.D.). She works across central areas of moral philosophy, with a particular focus on foundational issues in moral psychology and moral theory and on the intersection of such issues with metaethics and the philosophy of action. She has published papers on such topics as partiality, moral demandingness and overridingness, lying and testimony, practical irrationality, and the moral implications and significance of personal relationships. She co-edited Weakness of Will and Practical Irrationality (OUP, 2003) and the International Encyclopedia of Ethics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), which received a Dartmouth Medal Honorable Mention from the American Library Association.