معرفی
Helena de Bres is a Professor of Philosophy at Wellesley College, where she teaches courses in ethics, political philosophy, and philosophy of literature. She is affiliated with both the Philosophy Department and the Peace & Justice Studies program. Her academic work spans multiple areas of philosophical inquiry with a distinctive focus on both theoretical and practical dimensions of justice and meaning.
Her educational background includes a B.A. from the University of Victoria and both M.A. and Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
De Bres's research centers on two primary areas: philosophy of literature (particularly memoir and personal narrative) and global distributive justice. In philosophy of literature, she examines questions about the nature of memoir, the relationship between personal narration and meaning in life, and the ethics of self-representation. Her book Artful Truths (University of Chicago Press, 2021) provides a comprehensive discussion of philosophical questions about memoir. In political philosophy, she has developed a pluralistic approach to global distributive justice, arguing that principles of justice apply to multiple sites of transnational governance rather than to the global system as a whole. Her work challenges conventional frameworks in international ethics and offers nuanced analyses of justice in international trade, transnational governance, and cross-border political associations.
Her publication record demonstrates consistent scholarly output across these interconnected domains. The articles reveal a distinctive intellectual trajectory moving from welfare consequentialist approaches to global justice toward more pluralistic frameworks that recognize the complexity of international relationships. Her work on memoir and personal narrative represents a parallel strand of inquiry that connects with her broader ethical concerns about how we understand ourselves and our place in the world.
- ACLS Burkhardt Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars (held at Stanford in 2019-20)
De Bres has developed innovative teaching approaches, including a semester-long writing workshop called Philosophy in the First Person through Wellesley's Calderwood Program in Public Writing. She has also taught this material in a condensed format at the University of Vienna. Her teaching interests align with her research, focusing on ethics, political philosophy, and philosophy of literature. She has received recognition for her scholarly contributions through competitive fellowships and has built a substantial publication record in top philosophy journals.
Her current projects include a book on personal philosophical writing that aims to make a case for more personally-inflected philosophical expression within the academic profession. This work bridges her interests in both the theory and practice of philosophy, connecting her scholarship on narrative with her commitment to public philosophy and creative writing.
