2026 Philosophy Newsletter
Message from the Chair
Department Spotlights
Faculty Kudos
Alumni Class Notes
Message from the Chair
Greetings to all of our alumni from the George Washington University Department of Philosophy! The department has kept busy since our last newsletter. We are pleased to share with you a few of the exciting things happening in the department, including the achievements of our philosophy community.
We are very proud that we had the highest number of graduating majors in recent history this year: 28 students graduating with either the BA in philosophy, or the BA in philosophy, public affairs focus, as their first or second majors. Among our 2026 graduating class, we had a Thacher Fellow (Rose Ayar) and our first ever Griffith BA/MA Fellow (Mariam Muradyan).
Thacher Fellowships are highly competitive awards funding senior honors thesis projects in the Philosophy Department. The program is made possible by the generous support of our alum Michael Thacher, BA ’70. Rose’s project, supervised by David DeGrazia, explored approaches to ethically constraining AI systems in philosophically responsible ways. Mariam was our first ever Griffith BA/MA Fellow, which provides $3,000 to a student enrolled in our BA/MA program (which requires completing one of our BAs in philosophy together with our MA in philosophy and social policy in five years) who has submitted an exceptional BA honors thesis proposal. The Griffith BA/MA Fellowship is funded by a generous bequest from alumna Beth Loker, BA ’69, to the Griffith Endowed Fund. Mariam’s project was in meta-ethics, intervening in a classic debate concerning whether moral judgments track objective facts, and relating it to current empirical research in moral psychology. She was supervised by a team of faculty that included Eric Saidel, Laura Papish and myself.
Our long tradition of supporting undergraduate research on cutting-edge philosophical topics is alive and well!
As ever, thank you, alumni, so much for your support and involvement. Please stay in touch.
Sincerely,
Tadeusz Zawidzki
Department Chair
Department Spotlights
Philosophy Student-Alumni Dinner Celebrates Graduating Students and Research Fellows
The Philosophy Department hosted another successful student-alumni dinner this year at CIRCA Foggy Bottom. This annual event provides a space where faculty, graduating BA and MA students and local alumni can connect, socialize, and celebrate the end of the school year. Thacher Fellow Rose Ayar and BA/MA Fellow Mariam Muradyan also celebrated the culmination of their year-long research projects. Earlier that day Ayar presented her talk “Programming Ethics Into AI: A Hybrid Model for Sound Decision-Making” and Muradyan presented her talk “Queer Free Morality: A Response-Dependent Defense of Moral Realism.”
Philosophy Department Hike at Glenstone
During the spring 2026 semester, the Philosophy Department hosted a hike for faculty and students at Glenstone museum in collaboration with GW TRAiLS. Senior Harper Goldstein, BA ’26, an English-philosophy double major involved with GW TRAiLS, was a key coordinator of Philosophy Department hikes during his tenure at GW, and received the department’s Service Award during graduation weekend for his work organizing community hikes.
Faculty Kudos
- David DeGrazia was a temporary Investigator (visiting scholar) in the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health during the 2024-25 academic year as he worked on his sabbatical project “Investigating Moral Status.” He was also one of several scholars who were interviewed in the movie Humans and Other Animals.
- Tad Zawidzki was a keynote speaker at the 33rd meeting of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology in Utrecht, June 30-July 3, 2026, in Utrecht, Netherlands.
Alumni Class Notes
- Tyler Loveless, MA ’20, and Anna Skillings, BA ’19, are getting married in D.C. this September. They met at The GW Hatchet.
- Molly Moran, MA ’26, currently works as a grants research analyst at The Aubrey Group, a consulting firm in New Jersey. She enjoys helping nonprofits and municipalities find and manage grant funding for a variety of causes, such as housing, economic development, sustainability, arts and cultural programming and more.