The Department of Philosophy at UGA has an active research agenda that attracts a wide variety of internal and external grants. Active Grants UGA Philosophy professor Yuri Balashov has received an NSF grant for an interdisciplinary project exploring cognitive, linguistic, and philosophical aspects of human and machine translation. This grant-funded research operates in the spirit of making AI more transparent and explainable by connecting technical developments in a cutting-edge area of AI with important debates in philosophy of language, linguistics, and cognitive translation studies. Find more information here. Professor Aaron Meskin is part of a team of UGA scholars who received one of UGA's International Research Collaboration Grants to work with scholars at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences (ZRC SAZU). The grant supports a project entitled Arts and Emergent Technologies, focused on theoretical questions raised by the production and reception of literature and the visual arts in relationship to emerging technologies such as AI and recommender systems. Participants will investigate these issues from a variety of perspectives (analytic and continental philosophy, art history, comparative literature) while attending to the cultural complexities of such questions. Philosophy Professor Sarah Wright and Professor Ruth Harman from the Language and Literacy Education Department have received a $50,000 Capacity-Building Grant from the Educating Character Initiative, a project of The Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest University, one of only 68 institutions nationwide to receive one. The Educating Character Initiative is funded by Lilly Endowment Inc. Through their collaboration across colleges at UGA, the professors intend to explore how best to support faculty in including a focus on ethical reasoning and character education as they plan and implement classes to meet the upcoming university-wide ethics requirement. Because this is a new project for our university, in Fall 2026 the team will begin by developing a targeted survey that can help them determine what types of approaches faculty intend to use in their courses to satisfy this new requirement. In response to the survey’s data on faculty’s needs and practices, the team will develop three sample modules that each include a discipline-specific case study, analysis of pertinent ethical issues, and questions and activities that can support student reasoning about character traits and dilemmas. After the successful development of these modules, the research team will invite faculty across campus to attend 2-3 workshops in spring 2026 where they can experience firsthand the case study approach. The two-hour workshops will use the sample modules and reflective exercises to support participants in thinking about how to incorporate a focus on character traits informed by divergent perspectives and contexts into their course design.
