2025 Philosophy in Media Fellowship

 

 


Directed by Barry Lam, Associate Director of Marc Sanders Foundation, Professor of Philosophy at UC Riverside, and Host/Executive producer of the Hi-Phi Nation Podcast.

Philosophy in Media aims to identify and develop academically-trained philosophers to write, speak to, and produce for the general public in the major media market spaces. We concluded a year-long initial run of the program here with support from the John D. Templeton Foundation. Now, with a three-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and generous funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Princeton University’s Center for Human Values and the Department of Philosophy, we are pleased to share that we are now accepting applications for our second year of fellowships in 2025. Fellows will be academically-trained philosophers of all career stages who aim to write, speak to, and produce media for the general public in the form of essays (long- and short-form), trade-book writing, or podcasting.

Fellows will be accepted from all areas of philosophy, but should indicate both their professional areas of specialization and competence, as well as the topics or areas they would like to talk about when they speak to the public. Special consideration will be given to applicants whose professional or public-facing work focuses on race and racism, social justice, applied ethics of biology, technology, or other special sciences, and to applicants who are affiliated with HBCUs, Hispanic-serving institutions, Tribal colleges/universities, or underserved/under-resourced smaller regional or state schools.

Successful fellows will receive a $1500 stipend and full room and board at one of our three media workshops, to be held between June 23 – July 1, 2025. Workshops will be held at Tarrytown Estates in Tarrytown, NY, just north of New York City. One workshop will focus on essay writing (short- and long-form), one on trade books and publication, and one on podcast production and distribution. All will be led by esteemed media editors, producers, publishers, and agents.

Each workshop will be three days long. Travel to and from the venue will be covered by Media Fellows.

The schedule of the workshops are organized as follows:

  • June 23-June 25, 2025: Essay Writing (Short- and Long-form)
    Fellows will arrive the evening of June 22 and depart after the workshop concludes on June 25 at noon.
  • June 26-June 28, 2025: Trade Books and Publication
    Fellows will arrive the evening of June 25 and depart after the workshop concludes on June 28 at noon.
  • June 29 -July 1, 2025: Podcasting and Production
    Fellows will arrive the evening of June 28 and depart after the workshop concludes on July 1 at noon.

Learn more about the Philosophy in Media Initiative HERE.

 

Essay

Joshua Rothman

Joshua Rothman, the ideas editor of newyorker.com, has been at The New Yorker since 2012.

Link: The New Yorker

James Ryerson

James Ryerson has been an editor at The New York Times since 2003, first at the Sunday magazine and now at the Op-Ed page. Before that, he was an editor at Legal Affairs, Lingua Franca, and Feed. He has written introductory chapters for Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will, by David Foster Wallace, and Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty. In 2012-2013, he was awarded a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman fellowship from the New York Public Library. In 2018, he was awarded the Excellence in Science Journalism Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. He writes the Ivory Tower column for The New York Times Book Review and is at work on a book about the philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser.

Link: NYT

Trade Books

Margo Beth Fleming

Margo Beth Fleming is a Literary Agent and Managing Director of Brockman, Inc., where she seeks out and supports authoritative voices who change the way we see the world. The natural home for authors of serious nonfiction, Brockman represents 11 Nobel Laureates, three Pulitzer Prize winners, and over 45 bestsellers in the last decade alone.

Before she became an agent, Margo was an editor. In over a decade at Stanford University Press, she developed a young book program into one of the press’s flagship lists. Margo began her publishing career at SAGE, signing and developing titles on research methods and across the social sciences.

Follow Margo on Twitter @WordNerd Margo

Link: LinkedIn

Kate Manne

Kate Manne has been teaching at the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University since 2013. Before that, she was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows (2011–2013), did her graduate work at MIT (2006–2011), and was an undergraduate at the University of Melbourne (2001–2005), where she studied philosophy, logic, and computer science.

Nowadays, her research is primarily in moral, feminist, and social philosophy. Her first book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (New York: Oxford University Press) came out late in 2017 (copyright 2018). It constitutes a systemic exploration of the nature, function, and social dynamics of misogyny, even in allegedly post-patriarchal contexts such as the US, the UK, and Australia. Review essays and commentary about the book have appeared in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, the Times Literary Supplement, Guernica, Jezebel, Bitch Magazine, Vox, Slate, and the LA Review of Books, among other venues. Down Girl was selected as a Book of the Year by Carrie Tirado Bramen for Times Higher Education, Cordelia Fine for The Big Issue, Skye Cleary for The Reading Lists, Chuck Mertz for This is Hell, and was included among the Dozen Most Memorable Books of 2017 by Carlos Lozada for The Washington Post, the "Five Best Books on Cruelty and Evil" by Paul Bloom for Five Books, and "Big Summer Reads for 2018" by Kerri Miller (MPR News).

Her latest book Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women (Allen Lane/Random House) was released in August 2020.

Link: Website

Alane Salierno Mason

Alane Salierno Mason is a senior editor at W. W. Norton & Company. She is an editor at Words Without Borders (WWB), the online magazine for international literature. Mason graduated in 1986 from Carolina with a bachelor of arts degree with honors in creative writing and highest honors in English from the college. She has published nonfiction essays in various publications and anthologies, and is the translator of the New Directions Classic edition of Elio Vittorini’s Conversations in Sicily.

Link: LinkedIn

Emily Wunderlich

Emily Wunderlich is a senior editor at Viking, where she acquires a broad list of nonfiction books, seeking out strong voices, fresh takes, and new arguments that recast our understanding of the world around us or even help us live better. She has published a number of bestselling, award-winning, and critically acclaimed books from authors with a wide range of expertise and backgrounds, from journalists to biologists to historians to social scientists, activists, philosophers, politicians and paleontologists, and more. She ran a nonfiction literary reading series in Manhattan and prior to Viking, she worked at Gotham Books, Macmillan, and The Missouri Review.

Link:

Podcasting

Robert Krulwich

For 22 years, Krulwich was a science, economics, general assignment and foreign correspondent at ABC and CBS News. Krulwich has been called “the most inventive network reporter in television” by TV Guide. His specialty is explaining complex subjects, science, technology, economics, in a style that is clear, compelling and entertaining. On television he has explored the structure of DNA using a banana; on radio he created an Italian opera, “Ratto Interesso” to explain how the Federal Reserve regulates interest rates; he also pioneered the use of new animation on ABC’s Nightline and World News Tonight.

He has won Emmy awards for a cultural history of Barbie, the world famous doll, for a Frontline investigation of computers and privacy, a George Polk and an Emmy for a look at the Savings & Loan bailout, and the 2010 Essay Prize from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Krulwich also won the AAAS Science Journalism Award for a 2001 a NOVA Special, Cracking the Code of Life, The Extraordinary Communicator Award from the National Cancer Institute, and an Alfred I. Dupont-Columbia Award.

Krulwich earned a BA in history from Oberlin College, and a law degree from Columbia University in 1974.

Link: Website

Mia Lobel

Mia Lobel is the executive producer of Pushkin Industries, overseeing all podcast production including Revisionist History, The Happiness Lab, Against the Rules, and more.

She has been making audio content since 2001 for public radio stations, non-profit organizations, museums, universities, and voice-activated services.

She received a master’s degree from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and a B.A. from Wesleyan University. She has been an adjunct professor at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY since 2010.

Link: Website

Contact Us

The Marc Sanders Foundation would be happy to hear from you. Please feel free to contact us (e-mail is preferred) about any questions you might have.

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Kori Hensell

Copyright 2019 Marc Sanders Foundation