Meghan Sullivan

About the Contributor

Dr. Meghan Sullivan is the Wilsey Family College Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. She serves as Director of the University-wide Ethics Initiative and is the founding director of Notre Dame’s Institute for Ethics and the Common Good. The university hub for research and teaching in ethics, the Institute includes the new Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C, Center for Virtue Ethics and the Notre Dame–IBM Technology Ethics Lab. The Institute is home to faculty program chairs, postdoctoral fellows, PhD students, and undergraduates and runs several residential fellowship programs for faculty, nonprofit leaders, and faith leaders.

Dr. Sullivan is deeply interested in the ways philosophy contributes to the good life and the best methods for promoting philosophical thought. She has served as principal investigator for over $15 million in grants to advance ethics and human flourishing, from agencies including the John Templeton Foundation, the Lilly Endowment, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Time Biases, her 2018 book with Oxford University Press, offers philosophical guidance about how to navigate the puzzles that the passage of time poses to rational planning. It was featured in a 2021 New Yorker piece. In 2022, Dr. Sullivan published The Good Life Method with Penguin Press (co-authored with her teaching collaborator Paul Blaschko) based on a wildly popular introductory philosophy course she developed at Notre Dame called “God and the Good Life.” Since 2016, “God and the Good Life” has accompanied thousands of Notre Dame students through the process of developing a philosophical plan for their lives. In the past, Dr. Sullivan has collaborated with faculty in other departments to offer courses on NBC’s The Good Place, Ted Chiang’s science fiction, and Thom Browne’s fashion empire.

Dr. Sullivan is currently working on a book about the role of love in our moral lives. She is also directing a major grant project with scholars and nonprofit leaders to expand the love ethic, as well as a major planning grant considering the role of Christian thought in AI ethics.

Dr. Sullivan has been honored with one of Notre Dame’s Joyce Awards for Teaching, with the Provost’s All-Faculty Team Award, and with the City of South Bend’s 40 Under 40 Award. She holds degrees from the University of Virginia (BA: Philosophy and Politics, Highest Distinction), Oxford (BPhil: Philosophy), and Rutgers (PhD: Philosophy), and has studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar (Balliol College).

Dr. Sullivan enjoys cooking, building elaborate Lego sets, reading science fiction, and traveling the world. She cheers for the Fighting Irish and Virginia Cavaliers in all of their endeavors, and when they play each other she has a rational crisis.