Melissa Fitzpatrick, Ph.D.

Melissa Fitzpatrick joined the LMU Department of Management faculty in fall 2022. She previously served as assistant professor of the practice in ethics at Boston College’s Carroll School of Management where she introduced incoming students to philosophy as a lived practice, while guiding them toward an understanding of business as a force for good and vehicle for change.

Chief among her research interests is understanding how to foster a more sustainable community with the other-than-human world, and, as a vital foundation for that, how to overcome instrumental values. Her work in normative ethics focuses on the intersection of post-Kantian Continental philosophy and contemporary virtue ethics, arguing for the significance of "self-disruption" in ethical development. Melissa has also done integrated teaching, research, and community outreach in pre-college philosophy in the Mississippi Delta and on the Mexican-American border in El Paso, Texas.

Melissa earned her Ph.D. in philosophy from Boston College, an M.A. in philosophy from LMU and a B.S. in communication from Boston University. She is the co-author of Radical Hospitality: From Thought to Action.