Nancy Sherman

Nancy Sherman is University Professor and Professor of Philosophy. She has a University Affiliate appointment at Georgetown Law’s Center on National Security and the Law and is a Faculty Affiliate at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. She holds a Ph.D. from Harvard in philosophy where she was awarded the George Plympton Adam Prize for the most distinguished dissertation in the area of history of philosophy. She received an MLitt. from the University of Edinburgh and her B.A. from Bryn Mawr College. From 1997 to 1999 Sherman served as the first Distinguished Chair in Ethics at the U.S. Naval Academy, designing the brigade-wide required military ethics course as well as laying the groundwork for the new Stockdale Ethics Center. Before coming to Georgetown, she taught at Yale for seven years. She has research training in psychoanalysis at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute.

Sherman is a New York Times Notable Author. She is the author of Afterwar: Healing the Moral Wounds of our Soldiers (Oxford, 2015); The Untold War: Inside the Hearts, Minds, and Souls of our Soldiers (W.W. Norton, 2010); Stoic Warriors: The Ancient Philosophy Behind the Military Mind (Oxford, 2005); Making a Necessity of Virtue: Aristotle and Kant on Virtue (Cambridge, 1997); The Fabric of Character: Aristotle's Theory of Virtue, (Oxford 1989) and the editor of Critical Essays on the Classics: Aristotle's Ethics, Ed. (Rowman and Littlefield, 1999). She has written over 60 articles in the area of ethics, military ethics, the history of moral philosophy, ancient ethics, the emotions, moral psychology, and psychoanalysis.

Since 1995, Sherman has consulted for the U.S. Armed Forces on issues of ethics, moral injury, stoicism, resilience, and posttraumatic stress, lecturing here and abroad. In October 2005, Sherman visited Guantanamo Bay Detention Center as part of an independent observer team, assessing the medical and mental health care of detainees.