Mathias Risse is Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights, Global Affairs and Philosophy and Director of the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights at Harvard University. His research is primarily in political philosophy and philosophy of technology, and he is currently at work on a book on Indigenous philosophies. In political philosophy his work has addressed questions of global justice ranging from human rights, inequality, taxation, trade, and immigration to climate change, obligations to future generations. In the philosophy of technology Risse has recently offered a comprehensive account of political theory of the digital age. He has also worked on questions in ethics, decision theory and 19th century German philosophy, especially Nietzsche. He is the author or co-author of six books, including the 2012 On Global Justice and most recently the 2023 Political Theory of the Digital Age: Where Artificial Intelligence Might Take Us. At ÌÇÐÄvlog¹ÙÍø Risse has taught extensively both in degree programs and in executive education, including a regular week-long open-enrollment program called Emerging Leaders.
In addition to ÌÇÐÄvlog¹ÙÍø, Risse teaches in Harvard College and the Harvard Extension School, and is affiliated with the Philosophy Department, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Center for European Studies, and the Advanced Leadership Initiative (ALI). He served as the Co-Director of Graduate Studies at the Edmond J Safra Center for Ethics for about a decade and is currently the Director of the Program on the Ethics of Emerging Technologies there. He also is the Director of the McCloy program, a fellowship program for German students.
Risse regularly engages with collaborators on all continents and is one of the co-hosts of the Carr Center’s Justice Matters podcast. He has been the organizer of a number of major international conferences at Harvard and a co-organizer of several more such events in East and South East Asia (Singapore, Seoul and Shanghai), as a way of fostering collaboration among political philosophers and representatives of other fields across cultural divides. He has been a visiting professor at the National University of Singapore, New York University Abu Dhabi and Leuphana University in Germany. Risse grew up in a village in Westphalia, Germany. He studied in Bielefeld, Pittsburgh and Jerusalem, and then received his PhD from Princeton in 2000 and taught in the Department of Philosophy at Yale before coming to Harvard in 2002. He lived in Harvard's Eliot House for six years, and now resides in Somerville with his wife. See also .