Upcoming President’s Lecture to Explore Veterans’ Moral Wounds

 MISSOULA – The author of “Afterwar: Healing the Moral Wounds of our Soldiers” will present a lecture of the same name during the next installment the 2016-17 President’s Lecture Series at the University of Montana.

Nancy Sherman, author and Georgetown University philosophy professor, will deliver the Henry Bugbee Lecture on Philosophy at 8 p.m. Monday, March 13, in the Montana Theatre of the Performing Arts and Radio/Television Center. The lecture is in collaboration with UM’s psychology and military science departments.

Sherman also will lead the seminar “Soldiers and Dancers Sharing the Dance Floor” from 3 to 4:30 p.m. the same day in Gallagher Business Building Room 123. The seminar is in collaboration with the Philosophy Forum and, along with the lecture, is free and open to the public.

After receiving a doctorate from Harvard University in 1982, Sherman taught philosophy at Yale University until 1989, when she accepted a position at Georgetown University. From 1997 to 1999, Sherman was the inaugural Distinguished Chair of Ethics at the U.S. Naval Academy. Since 2001 she has been the University Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown. Her research interests include ethics, moral psychology, the history of moral philosophy, ancient philosophy and ethics, military ethics and emotions.

Trained in psychoanalysis at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, Sherman has consulted with the U.S. Armed Forces on issues of ethics, resilience and post-traumatic stress. She has lectured at the Uniformed Services University, Walter Reed Army Hospital, the National Defense University, and military academies and bases. Her work with veterans groups has earned high praise. She is a frequent guest on television news programs, and her op-eds appear in newspapers across the country, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

She also has written half a dozen books on philosophy, as well as how it relates to the military mind.

One critic hailed her 2015 “Afterwar” as a book that “brilliantly explores the moral and philosophical complexities of homecomings for modern veterans.” Another said it revealed “the souls of our soldiers and the wounds that are deeply hidden” with wisdom and compassion.