Pamela M. HallCoordinator, Honors Program. Associate Professor

Pam Hall works in the areas of ethics (especially virtue ethics), moral psychology, and ethics, theology, and literature. She is a Senior Faculty Fellow in the Emory Center for Ethics. She wants to understand the nature and experience of the self, drawing on humanistic work in philosophy, theology, and literature for help.  How can we understand selfhood as a dynamic and ongoing process?  How does this guide and change our conceptions of the virtues and their work?  And -- what are the richest and most helpful ways to think about these questions?  This leads her to consider narrative’s role in the moral life and why literature, and art more broadly, is crucial for reflection on the human.  She has written on Aquinas’s ethics (Narrative and the Natural Law: An Interpretation of Thomistic Ethics, University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), on the virtues according to MacIntyre, Murdoch, and Nussbaum, and on Baby Suggs, holy, in the novel Beloved.  She is currently thinking about selfhood in relation to saintly life and researching the history and meaning of a traditional African-American spiritual in relation to the question of life change.

On the undergraduate level, Dr. Hall regularly teaches “Ethics: Human Goodness” as well as other courses.

Dr. Hall received the Emory Williams Award for Distinguished Teaching in the Humanities from Emory University in 1992, and she was awarded the Massee-Martin/NEH Distinguished Teaching Chair in Emory College for the term of 1998-2002.  She has also won a Crystal Apple Teaching Award.  She was Chair of the Department of Women’s Studies from 2003-06.  She has served on the national Committee on the Status of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender People in the Profession of the American Philosophical Association.  She has served on way too many committees at Emory.

When she is not writing, teaching, or serving, Dr. Hall also likes to birdwatch, garden, and work with her dog.  These things too are part of a good life.

Education

• PhD, Vanderbilt University, 1987
• BA, University of Dallas, 1982

Research and Teaching

• Ethics and moral psychology
• Ethics and narrative
• History of Western philosophy
• Feminist thought

Publications

• Narrative and the Natural Law (1994)