Abby Staysa is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Politics at Princeton University. Her current research is about the significance of pleasure and pain in Aristotle’s philosophy of education and political science. Whereas the liberal political tradition imagines pleasure and pain as instrumental for fostering a political regime in which individuals are free without interference to shape their own lives, Aristotle contends that citizens must be trained to derive pleasure from the activities that accord with virtue. Illuminating the deep differences that mark the two perspectives, this project examines how regimes and political life differ given the different understandings of the place of pleasure and pain in our education. 

Abby received a PhD in Political Science from the University of Notre Dame and a BA in Political Science and Philosophy from Hiram College.