A Reading and Discussion with Nancy Sherman
October 14
2:30-4:00
207 Hall of Languages
Please join the Nonfiction Reading Series and the Moral Injury Project of Syracuse University for a reading and discussion by Dr. Nancy Sherman, author of Afterwar and the Untold War on Friday, October 14th, from 2:30-4:00 p.m. in 207 Hall of Languages. Following her reading, there will be a reception and book signing. This reading is free and open to the public.
“Trained in both ancient ethics and psychoanalysis, and with twenty years of experience working with the military, Sherman draws on in-depth interviews with servicemen and women to paint a richly textured and compassionate picture of the moral and psychological aftermath of America’s longest wars. . . . 2.6 million soldiers are currently returning home from war, the greatest number since Vietnam. Facing an increase in suicides and post-traumatic stress, the military has embraced measures such as resilience training and positive psychology to heal mind as well as body. Sherman argues that some psychological wounds of war need a kind of healing through moral understanding that is the special province of philosophical engagement and listening.”
Professor Sherman is University Professor at Georgetown and Professor of Philosophy. She has a University Affiliate appointment at Georgetown Law’s Center on National Security and the Law and is a Faculty Affiliate at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics.
Nancy Sherman received her BA from Bryn Mawr College and her PhD from Harvard. She received her MLitt from the University of Edinburgh. From 1997 to 1999 Ms Sherman served as the first Distinguished Chair in Ethics at the US Naval Academy, designing the brigade-wide required military ethics course as well as laying the groundwork for the new Stockdale Ethics Center. She has taught at Yale, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Maryland and has trained in psychoanalysis at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute. Since 1995, she has consulted for the U.S. Armed Forces on issues of ethics, resilience, and posttraumatic stress, lecturing at the Uniformed Services University, Walter Reed Army Hospital, the National Defense University, and many other military academies, bases, and veterans groups throughout the U. S. as well as abroad. In October 2005, Ms Sherman visited Guantanamo Bay Detention Center as part of an independent observer team, assessing the medical and mental health care of detainees. She has served on the Board of Directors for the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs.
Professor Sherman has received fellowships for her work from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council for Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, the Yale Whitney Humanities Center, the American Philosophical Society, and the Newcombe Fellowship of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. Sherman is a New York Times Notable Author. At Harvard she was awarded the George Plympton Adam Prize for the most distinguished dissertation in the area of history of philosophy, 1982. She received the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute’s Gary O. Morris Award for her psychoanalytic writing in 1999.
Professor Sherman has served on the National Board of Officers of the American Philosophical Association, elected as Representative of the Association’s Eastern Division, 2007-2010. She has been a frequent contributor in the media, appearing, among other places, on the Diane Rehm Show, the Kojo Namdi Show, PBS’s Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, BBC, Australian, Broadcasting System, Canadian Broadcasting System, MSNBC, FOX News, CNN, WABC, This American Life, The Leonard Lopate Show, Here and Now, and many NPR affiliates. Her articles, opinion pieces, and reviews of her work have appeared widely in the press, including in The New York Times, The LA Times, The Wall Street Journal, TIME Magazine, Newsweek, Huffington Post, The Chronicle Review, The San Diego Tribune, The Denver Post, The Boston Globe, The Baltimore Sun, The Dallas Morning News, The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, the Pittsburgh Gazette, the Hartford Courant, the Providence Journal, the Post and Courier, Dissent, and the Philosophers’ Magazine among other venues. She is a contributor to the New York Time’s Stone and Psychology Today.
Her publications include Afterwar: Healing the Moral Wounds of our Soldiers (Oxford, 2015); The Untold War: Inside the Hearts, Minds, and Souls of our Soldiers (W.W. Norton, 2010); Stoic Warriors: The Ancient Philosophy Behind the Military Mind (Oxford, 2005); Making a Necessity of Virtue: Aristotle and Kant on Virtue (Cambridge, 1997); The Fabric of Character: Aristotle’s Theory of Virtue, (Oxford 1989, translated in Spanish, 1998); Critical Essays on the Classics: Aristotle’s Ethics, Ed. (Rowman and Littlefield, 1999). She has written over 60 articles in the area of ethics, military ethics, the history of moral philosophy, ancient ethics, the emotions, moral psychology, and psychoanalysis.