Feminism & Virtue, Religion & Social Change:

What Can Mary Wollstonecraft Teach Us?

Panel Discussion

Mary Wollstonecraft wrote more than 200 years ago, but her thought is still discussed and debated today. Panelists will discuss how Wollstonecraft's own religiosity inspired her theologically-informed account of virtue, equality and rights, and how the same can contribute to thinking about feminism, virtue ethics and social change today.

4 pm - 6 pm

Friday, October 20

Fong Auditorium, Boylston Hall

Harvard University

Panel will be preceded by noon luncheon with panelists for interested students and community members (RSVP required).

Join us at 4 pm on Friday, October 20 in the Fong Auditorium to discuss Mary Wollstonecraft’s vision of feminism informed by her understanding of religion and virtue. AAI senior fellow Erika Bachiochi will moderate discussion among panelists Jennifer Banks, Sarah Byers, and Emily Dumler-Winckler.

RSVP Below!

RSVP: Feminism & Virtue, Religion & Social Change Panel

RSVP: Lunch with the Panelists

Panel will be preceded by a noon luncheon with panelists at AAI on the topic of work-life balance. RSVP required as seating is limited.

Thank you for your interest. spots for the luncheon have now been filled.

Emily Dumler-Winckler Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Christian Ethics and Constructive Theology at Saint Louis University. Her first book Modern Virtue: Mary Wollstonecraft and a Tradition of Dissent (Oxford University Press 2022) uses close readings of Wollstonecraft and the Revolution debates of the 1790s to intervene in a wide-ranging set of historical and contemporary debates about virtues, rights, democracy, common goods, feminist theology, social change, and revolution. The first systematic treatment of Mary Wollstonecraft as a religious thinker, the book recovers Wollstonecraft the theologian, virtue ethicist, and political theorist.

Jennifer Banks is the author of Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth, published in May 2023 by W.W. Norton. Her work has been reviewed or featured in The Washington Post, Lithub, Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus, Current, Comment, Big Think, The Boston Review, The Best American Poetry, and more. A graduate of Cornell University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is Senior Executive Editor at Yale University Press where she has acquired books on literature, religion, and philosophy since 2007. She has also worked at International Creative Management, the Continuum International Publishing Group, and Harvard University Press.

Sarah Catherine Byers Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at Boston College. She received her PH.D in Philosophy from the University of Toronto. She has published a monograph about Augustine and Hellenistic philosophy with Cambridge University Press, as well as numerous articles on the history of ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology.

Erika Bachiochi J.D. is a legal scholar specializing in Equal Protection jurisprudence, feminist legal theory, and Catholic social teaching, and sexual ethics. A graduate of Middlebury College, Erika was a Bradley Fellow at the Institute for Religion and Politics at Boston College, received her law degree from Boston University School of Law, and spent a year as a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School. Her latest book, The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision was published by Notre Dame University Press in 2021. Erika is also a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.