Sean Dorrance Kelly is Bae Family Dean of Arts and Humanities and Teresa G. and Ferdinand F. Martignetti Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of California at Berkeley, as well as an ScB in Math and Computer Science and an MS in Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences from Brown University. Before joining the Harvard faculty in 2006, Dean Kelly taught Philosophy and the Humanities at Stanford (1998-1999) and Philosophy and Neuroscience at Princeton (1999-2006).
A specialist in Post-Kantian European Philosophy, as well as in the Philosophy of Mind, Dean Kelly is the author of two books and many articles. His New York Times bestseller, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age, was co-authored with Hubert L. Dreyfus and published by Free Press in 2011. A more technical monograph, The Relevance of Phenomenology to the Philosophy of Language and Mind, was published by Routledge in 2000. He has published for general audiences in venues such as The New York Times, New York Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, and MIT Technology Review, while his scholarly work has appeared in journals ranging from Philosophical Review to the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. A popular public speaker, Dean Kelly has appeared in venues such as The Stephen Colbert Show, The Lex Fridman Podcast, and various NPR radio programs.
Internationally renowned for his work in philosophy and related areas, Dean Kelly has given talks across the world, from Australia to Argentina, and from Norway to China. He has served as a Visiting Professor at University College Dublin and at the École Normale Supériere in Paris; he has been a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley and at the American Academy in Rome. Both his teaching and his scholarship have been widely celebrated. In 2026, he will complete a five-year term as Harvard College Professor, the FAS’s highest teaching award. For his philosophical and scientific work, he has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Science Foundation, among many others. An accomplished administrator, Dean Kelly served as Chair of the Philosophy Department from 2009-2015, co-chaired a committee to review the teaching of the Humanities at Harvard College in 2013, and chaired the General Education Review Committee from 2014-16. A Varsity swimmer in college, he served for well over a decade on the Faculty Standing Committee on Athletics, first at Princeton and later at Harvard. With his wife Cheryl Chen, also a faculty member in the Harvard Philosophy Department, he has served as the Faculty Dean of Dunster House (Go Meese!) since 2017.