Martina Orlandi

(she/her/hers)


I am Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Trent University.

Before that, I was a Postdoctoral Scholar in Engaged Ethics at the Rock Ethics Institute and The Schreyer Honors College at the Pennsylvania State University where I did research within the Empathy & Moral Psychology Lab and worked to develop a new ethics curriculum for The Schreyer Honors College.

I am Co-Pi (together with Daryl C. Cameron, PI) of the of the research project: ‘You Do Your Own Dirty Work’: Addressing the Risks of Ethical Outsourcing to Artificial Intelligence.

In 2021 I was an affiliate member of Penn State's Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence (CSRAI) and of at the Center for Advanced Studies at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where I worked on a research project on trust in science about “Persuading Under Uncertainty” (PI: Ophelia Deroy).

I am also a public philosopher and in 2022 I was selected as an inaugural Marc Sanders Foundation Philosophy in the Media Fellow.

I did my graduate work at McGill University where I was a member of the Research Center for Ethics (CRE) and of the Interuniversity Research Group on Normativity (GRIN), which I also coordinated in 2016-2017.

My research interests are broad and range across philosophy of mind and action, ethics, epistemology, and moral psychology. I have a longstanding interest in practical irrationality, particularly self-control and self-deception, where I have worked on developing an account of what it is to come out of self-deception.

​More recently, I have been working on conspiratorial beliefs and why they tenaciously persist over time as well as on the reasons that fuel and sustain vaccine-hesitancy. I am also working on a project about resilience where I propose that we abandon the traditionally individualistic notion known to undermine structural injustices and cause burnout in favour of a relational account of resilience. My paper "Rethinking Resiliency After Covid-19: Towards a Relational View" is forthcoming in a Routledge volume on Pandemic Relations: [Re]Forging our Moral Bonds in the Time of COVID-19, edited by Evandro Barbosa.

​Outside of my day job, I have a strong commitment to public philosophy and have published my work in several popular venues. In 2019, I published (in The Conversation) an article on why good character testimonies do not constitute a defence for sexual harassment. And in 2020-2021 I was a regular columnist at The Prindle Post, where I wrote about ethics and social philosophy. Since 2017 I have been one of the hosts of a weekly radio show on air on CFMB1280, where I have had the opportunity to talk philosophy with a wider audience.

I am originally from Italy. I did my B.A. at the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’ and my M.A. at the University of Florence.