Felicia Nimue Ackerman


Felicia Nimue Ackerman is an American author, poet, and philosopher serving as professor of philosophy at Brown University, as of 2014.

Early life and education

Ackerman was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1947.
She received her BA, summa cum laude, from Cornell University in 1968, and earned her PhD from the University of Michigan in 1976. Regarding her first name, she writes "Felicia Nimue is a double first name like Mary Jane, and I’m called the whole thing".

Selected publications

According to Andrew Marantz of The New Yorker, Ackerman "is a short-story writer and a philosophy professor at Brown, and she excels at crafting arguments concisely."
Her research interests center on the philosophy of literature, bioethics, and moral psychology:
According to Oxford Handbooks Online Scholarly Research Review, "her short stories on bioethical themes have appeared in Commentary, Mid‐American Review, Prize Stories 1990: The O. Henry Awards, and Clones and Clones: Facts and Fantasies About Human Cloning."
She has published fifteen short stories, including:
She writes a monthly op-ed column for The Providence Journal.
Ackerman is also a frequent letter writer to The New York Times, especially on subjects relating to the treatment of the elderly. Marantz says letters editor Tom Feyer named Ackerman the top contender as record holder for the most letters published, exceeding 200 letters since 1987. In an WNYC interview, Feyer also noted Ackerman writes as many as five letters to the editor per day.

Awards

From January to June 1985, she served as Senior Fulbright Lecturer in Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
From 1988–89, she served as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.
In 1990, her short story, "The Forecasting Game: a story" was published in the annual Prize Stories 1990 O. Henry Awards collection.