Karen Detlefsen has been named the Adam Seybert Professor in Moral and Intellectual Philosophy in the School of Arts & Sciences. Dr. Detlefsen’s research focuses on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy, women philosophers of that period, and the philosophy of education. Professor Detlefsen is a graduate of the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, where she majored in English and philosophy. She holds a master’s degree from the University of Western Ontario and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Toronto.
Nicole Rust has been appointed the Rose Family Endowed Term Professor of Psychology in the School of Arts & Sciences. Her research focuses on understanding the brain’s ability to remember the things we’ve seen—visual memory—and what in the brain drives the mysterious feeling we call “mood.” Professor Rust is the author of Elusive Cures: Why Neuroscience Hasn’t Solved Brain Disorders — And How We Can Change That (Princeton University Press, 2025). Dr. Rust received a bachelor’s degree in molecular biology from the University of Idaho. She holds a Ph.D. in neural science from New York University and completed postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Lilith Todd has been named the Stephen M. Gorn Family Assistant Professor of English in the School of Arts & Sciences. Dr. Todd studies seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British, American, and Caribbean literature; care work in the past and present; and poetics across literary forms. She is currently completing a book entitled Care Work: Nursing and Writing, 1650-1800. Dr. Todd is a graduate of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where she majored in English and history. She holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Columbia University in New York City.