Professore Ordinario of Political and Social Theory, as well as Political Bioethics, informed by philosophy, political science and sociology, at the University of Texas at Austin. Guest professorships in Germany, Austria, Sweden, Japan, China, Brazil. Studied with Michael Walzer in Princeton, Axel Honneth in Berlin, Seyla Benhabib at Yale. In addition to more than 90 sole-authored articles, author of six books: Indigeneity as Social Construct and Political Tool: Critique and Reconstruction of a Contested Identity (De Gruyter, 2026); Creating Human Nature: The Political Challenges of Genetic Engineering (Cambridge 2022); The Human Rights State (Pennsylvania 2016); Human Rights as Social Construction (Cambridge 2012); Thick Moralities, Thin Politics (Duke 2003); Coping in Politics with Indeterminate Norms (SUNY 2003). Preparing new book: Code and Conscience: AI, Human Genetic Engineering, and the Political Future of Humanity. Has presented aspects of his work at invited lectures in Europe, Asia, South America, and the USA. Work has been translated into German, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, and Chinese. As of 2023: appointment as International Instructor at Universitas Hasanuddin, Makassar, Sulawesi, Indonesia. Summer 2023, Visiting Researcher, Centre for Bioethics, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta, Java, Indonesia. Summer 2022, Visiting Researcher at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics, National University of Singapore. 2021-2022: Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Public International Law at Lund University, Sweden.
Current research agenda: proceeds along several tracks that intersect at points: political bioethics; political challenges of artificial intelligence; and human rights as social science, not theology or metaphysics.
Grants: 2025-2029 (under review): National Science Foundation grant to establish ethical guidelines for experimentation in neuromorphic-organoid interfaces; evaluate legal implications of regulatory oversight and liability; and make case studies that explore similar historical biotechnological advances to analyze the social and ethical lessons relevant to the current project. Has received grants, in 2024, for research on bioethics for indigenous peoples (with case studies from India); in 2023, for establishing university-to-university-level collaboration with the Center for Bioethics, Faculty of Medicine, Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia; in 2023-25, from the National Science Foundation, for collaboration with laboratory scientists, on ethical issues of the new technology and how they may be addressed through new design features: “Building a Cell from Scratch: Design and Ethics”; in 2021/2022, as the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Public International Law at Lund University, Sweden; in 2022, as a visiting researcher at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore: “Might the Bioethical Principle of Individual Decisional Autonomy Have a Politically Liberalizing Effect on Soft Authoritarian Communities?”; in 2019, as a visiting researcher at the Danish Institute for Human Rights, Copenhagen: “Beyond Due Diligence: The Human Rights Corporation”; in 2018, as a visiting researcher at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and at the Ethox Centre, both University of Oxford: “Creating Human Nature: The Political Challenges of Genetic Engineering.”
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9510-6147
