Nir Eisikovits & Alec Stubbs

Nir Eisikovits is a professor of philosophy and founding director of the Applied Ethics Center. Before coming to UMass Boston he was associate professor of legal and political philosophy at Suffolk University, where he co-founded and directed the Graduate Program in Ethics and Public Policy. Professor Eisikovits’s research focuses on the moral and political dilemmas arising after war. He is author of "A Theory of Truces" (Palgrave MacMillan) and "Sympathizing with the Enemy: Reconciliation, Transitional Justice, Negotiation" (Brill) and co-editor of "Theorizing Transitional Justice" (Routledge). He is also guest editor for a recent issue of Theoria on "The Idea of Peace in the Age of Asymmetrical Warfare." Eisikovits has written numerous articles on political reconciliation, transitional justice, the role of forgiveness in politics, truth commissions, and the ethics of war. An Israeli attorney, Eisikovits earned his PhD from Boston University in 2005. In addition to his scholarly work, he advises several NGOs focused on conflict resolution and comments frequently on the Middle East conflict for American newspapers and magazines. His op-eds and essays have appeared in the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor, the Miami Herald, the National Interest, the Forward, and Cognoscenti, among others. Nir's most recent work focuses on the ethics of artificial intelligence. The Applied Ethics Center at UMB has recently launched AIEX - a project exploring how engagement with AI changes peoples' understanding of themselves. I am a philosopher and a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Boston & The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. My work focuses primarily on social and political philosophy as well as continental philosophy, ethics, existentialism, and philosophy of technology. I think and write about the meaning of work and play in our lives, economic democracy, post-capitalist alternatives, prefigurative social change, and absurdism.