Author: Benjamin Gregg
Benjamin Gregg teaches social and political theory, as well as bioethics, informed by philosophy and sociology, at the University of Texas at Austin but also in Germany (Frankfurt/O), Austria (Linz and Innsbruck), Sweden (Lund), Japan (Tokyo and Hokkaido), China (Beijing), and Brazil (Goiãnia). The College of Liberal Arts Committees on Research and Teaching awarded him the Silver Spurs Fellowship in recognition of outstanding scholarship and teaching. He has conducted graduate master classes at the Universidade Federal de Goiás in Brazil, at the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg in Germany, at the University of Hokkaido in Japan, and at the University of Glasgow in the UK. He studied with Michael Walzer in Princeton, Axel Honneth in Berlin, and Seyla Benhabib at Yale. In addition to more than eighty sole-authored articles, he is the author of The Human Rights State (Pennsylvania, 2016); Human Rights as Social Construction (Cambridge, 2012); Thick Moralities, Thin Politics (Duke, 2003); and Coping in Politics with Indeterminate Norms (SUNY, 2003). Cambridge University Press will publish his newest book, Constructing Human Nature: The Political Challenges of Genetic Engineering, in 2022. He has presented aspects of this project at invited lectures in Europe, Asia, South America, and the United States. His work has been translated into German, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, and Chinese.
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Gregg is a consulting member of a team (Jeanne Stachowiak, Biomedical Engineering, and Brian Belardi, Chemical Engineering, both UT Austin) whose proposal (“Synthetic Adhesome Cells: Engineering Interfaces Between Synthetic and Live Cells for Controlled Delivery”) recently won a National Science Foundation three-year grant for $1,052,000 for research on the development of synthetic cells, i.e., cells built from purified components with a designed purpose, with a two-fold goal: with the Synthetic Adhesome Cell platform, (a) to create systems with user-defined control over intracellular delivery and (b) to shed light on the biophysical mechanisms underlying junction formation and communication at cell-cell interfaces. The grant includes development of a team-taught course titled "Building a Cell from Scratch: Design and Ethics” (cross-listed in the Cockrell School of Engineering and the College of Liberal Arts), which in part considers ethical issues of the new technology and how these issues might be addressed through new design features. His responsibility: the ethical implications of the research aims of the proposal as well developing the syllabus. He has been working for several years now on developing a new field in political theory called “political bioethics”: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/creating-human-nature/F85C56CD9D5B13ECC853EEB3241EBFFC
