Faculty & Staff Directory
Sandra Sullivan-Dunbar, PhD
Title/s: Associate Professor
Office #: Crown Center 321
Phone: 773.508.2481
Email:
CV Link: Sullivan-Dunbar CV 2017
About
Dr. Sullivan-Dunbar’s research in Christian ethics is broadly feminist and interdisciplinary. She explores the intersections of Christian ethics with economic theory, political institutions, history and social policy, with particular reference to women’s moral agency, reproductive lives and reproductive labor. Dr. Sullivan-Dunbar’s first book, Human Dependency and Christian Ethics, explores the erasure of human dependency and dependent care work from modern political and economic theory as well as from recent Protestant and Catholic conceptions of Christian love. She draws on feminist political theory to suggest necessary elements for a Christian ethic of love and justice that acknowledges the pervasive reality of human dependency and values the work of dependent care.
Dr. Sullivan-Dunbar’s current work explores the relationship between reproductive agency and the agency of democratic citizenship. Her next major project will analyze contemporary Christian discourse about abortion and propose a Christian ethic of reproductive justice and multiracial democracy.
Degrees
Ph.D. Religious Ethics, University of Chicago
M.Div., Jesuit School of Theology at Santa Clara University
M.A. Ethics and Social Theory, Graduate Theological Union
M.P.P., Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California-Berkeley
A.B. Religious Studies, Brown University
Program Areas
Sullivan-Dunbar’s current work focuses on human dependency and dependent care relations as a lens through which to understand Christian love, and as a site of systematic injustice along lines of gender, race, class, nationality and citizenship status.
Research Interests
Religion and reproductive justice, feminist ethics (Christian, philosophical, political), economic ethics and the care economy, Christian social ethics.
Selected Publications
“Catholic Abortion Discourse and the Erosion of Democracy,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, forthcoming Spring/Summer 2023.
“Family.” Blackwell Companion to Religious Ethics, edited by William Schweiker. Forthcoming, Wiley-Blackwell.
“The Care Economy as Alternative Economy,” in Working Alternatives: Catholic Experiments in Work and Economy, ed. John Seitz and Christine Firer Hinze. New York: Fordham University Press (2020), 21-44.
Human Dependency and Christian Ethics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
