Meghan Sullivan
Founding Director of the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good; Director of the Ethics Initiative; Wilsey Family College Professor of Philosophy
Biography
Meghan Sullivan is the Wilsey Family College Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, where she directs the University-wide Ethics Initiative and is founding director of the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good. The Institute is Notre Dame's hub for research and teaching in ethics, and is home to the Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C. Center for Virtue Ethics, the Notre Dame–IBM Technology Ethics Lab, and host to a growing cohort of affiliated faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate and undergraduate students, as well as several residential fellowship programs for faculty, nonprofit, and faith leaders.
Sullivan is a philosopher and public intellectual working at the intersection of virtue ethics, love, and emerging technology, with a particular focus on how faith communities can shape, rather than simply react to, the thorniest ethical questions AI raises. She leads DELTA, a major initiative developing a faith-based framework for human formation and ethics in the age of AI, supported by the Lilly Endowment Inc.
Sullivan’s work and commentary have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. She has served as Principal Investigator on more than $70 million in grants supporting ethics and human flourishing, from funders including the John Templeton Foundation, the Lilly Endowment, the Mellon Foundation, and the NEH. In 2025, she was a featured speaker at the TED Next Conference.
Sullivan is the author of Time Biases (Oxford University Press, 2018), a philosophical guide to the puzzles the passage of time poses for rational planning, featured in a 2021 New Yorker piece, and The Good Life Method (Penguin Press, 2022, with Paul Blaschko), drawn from Sullivan and Blaschko’s wildly popular Notre Dame course, "God and the Good Life." Since 2016, that course has walked thousands of Notre Dame students through building a philosophical plan for their lives. Sullivan has also collaborated across departments on courses examining NBC's The Good Place, Ted Chiang's science fiction, and Thom Browne's fashion empire.
Her next book, Loving Strangers, is under contract with Oxford University Press and explores the role of love in moral life through the framework of the Parable of the Good Samaritan. She is also directing a major grant project to expand a love-based ethical framework with scholars and nonprofit leaders.
She has been honored with a Notre Dame Joyce Award for Teaching, the Provost's All-Faculty Team Award, and the City of South Bend's 40 Under 40 Award, and is a member of the Board of Directors of Commonweal. Sullivan holds degrees from the University of Virginia (B.A., Philosophy and Politics, Highest Distinction), Oxford (B.Phil, Philosophy), and Rutgers (Ph.D., Philosophy), and studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar (Balliol College). She enjoys cooking, building elaborate Lego sets, reading science fiction, and traveling the world, and cheers for the Fighting Irish and Virginia Cavaliers in all their endeavors, though when the two play each other she has a rational crisis.