Visiting Fellows and Scholars

Visiting Fellows 2024-2025

Professor Cihan Artunç (Michaelmas Term)

Cihan Artunç is an Associate Professor of Economics at Middlebury College. His research studies the history of the business organization and firm dynamics: what type of legal forms of enterprise and governance structures firms adopt, how legal institutions shaped these choices, and how they affected firm performance. His scholarship focuses on the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, and Egypt in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when these economies experienced significant legal reforms. During his stay at Corpus, he will study the implications of close connections between corporations and political representatives for firm productivity, industry dynamics, corporate governance, and politicians’ voting behavior.

Professor Melissa Lane (Isaiah Berlin Visiting Professor, Michaelmas Term)

Melissa Lane is the Class of 1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton University, where she is also Associated Faculty in Classics and in Philosophy. She visits Corpus this Michaelmas as the Isaiah Berlin Visiting Professor, and will be delivering the Berlin Lectures titled ‘Lycurgus to Moses: Thinking with Lawgivers in Legal and Political Philosophy’ in the Faculty of Philosophy (on Tuesdays at 5 PM in Weeks 3-8, i.e. from 29 October through 3 December).  In spring 2025 she will be a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Classical Studies in London, and continue to deliver public lectures in her term as the fiftieth Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College in London. She has held a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of classics as well as fellowships and visiting professorships at a number of institutions including the ANU, Auckland, Harvard, Stanford, the American Academy in Rome, and the École Normale Supérieure. Professor Lane completed an MPhil and PhD in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, where she then taught for fifteen years before moving to Princeton in 2009. Her most recent monograph, titled Of Rule and Office: Plato's Ideas of the Political and published in 2023 by Princeton University Press, is based on the Carlyle Lectures which she delivered at Oxford in Hilary 2018. 

Professor Samuel Rickless (Hilary and Trinity Terms)

Samuel C. Rickless is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California San Diego, where he has taught since 2001.  He was born in France and raised in Paris and London, where he attended the Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle.  He spent his undergraduate years studying philosophy and mathematics at Harvard University (B.A. 1986).  In 1986, he was awarded a Marshall Scholarship and chose to attend Balliol College, Oxford, where he was supervised by Michael Dummett, David Pears, and Ronald Dworkin and earned a B. Phil. in philosophy in 1988.  He completed his graduate work at UCLA (Ph.D. 1996), with a dissertation in the philosophy of language supervised by David Kaplan.  Before joining the faculty at UC San Diego, he was an assistant professor of philosophy at Florida State University.  His areas of research include the history of Ancient Greek philosophy (particularly Plato), the history of modern European philosophy (with particular focus on John Locke, Mary Astell, George Berkeley, David Hume, and Mary Shepherd), non-consequentialist normative ethics (particularly the doctrine of doing and allowing and the doctrine of double effect), and the philosophy of law (focusing on informational privacy and theories of legal interpretation and adjudication).  He is a member of the Moral Judgments Project at UC San Diego, a group that conducts experiments designed to probe the social and individual psychology of moral judgment.  He has authored three books: Plato's Forms in Transition: A Reading of the Parmenides (Cambridge University Press 2007), Berkeley's Argument for Idealism (Oxford University Press 2013), and Locke (Wiley-Blackwell 2014); and he has co-edited three books: The Ethics of War: Essays (Oxford University Press 2017), The Ethics and Law of Omissions (Oxford University Press 2017), and The Oxford Handbook of Berkeley (Oxford University Press 2022).  He has published over 70 articles that have appeared in philosophy journals, law reviews, and anthologies.  He is on sabbatical from UC San Diego for the academic year 2024-25, and his main sabbatical project is a book on legal adjudication.  

Professor Michael Thurston (Hilary Term)

Michael Thurston is the Helen Means Professor of English Language and Literature at Smith College, where he has taught since 2000. He is the author of Making Something Happen: American Political Poets between the World Wars, The Underworld Descent in Twentieth-Century Poetry: From Pound and Eliot to Heaney and Walcott, and (with Nigel Alderman) Reading Postwar British and Irish Poetry. He has published numerous essays on modern poetry and modernist writing, including three on Ernest Hemingway. He is the editor of the Norton Critical Edition of The Sun Also Rises and is writing the Cambridge Introduction to Ernest Hemingway. With the support of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, he is also working on a book on the Harvard literary scholar, F.O. Matthiessen. From 2019 to 2024 he served as the provost and dean of faculty at Smith. With the support of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, he is also working on a book on the Harvard literary scholar, F.O. Matthiessen, the project he will focus on during his time at Corpus.