Email: a.abram@heythrop.ac.uk
Telephone: 020 7795 4220

Anna is a lecturer in Ethics, Head of Department of Pastoral and Social Studies, and Programme Convenor of the MA in Contemporary Ethics

Biography

Born in Poland Anna completed her first degree in theology with special focus on moral theology at Cardinal Wyszynski University in Warsaw (1992), and then received her MTh (1994) and PhD (2001) in Christian Ethics from Heythrop College.  Her doctoral dissertation was an interdisciplinary study of moral development from the perspective of developmental moral psychology and virtue ethics. 
 
Anna’s teaching experience began in Poland in 1990, at the time when religious education for the first time since the fall of communism was formally introduced to schools.  While studying theology she taught ‘religion’ to primary school children - she found this arrangement of simultaneous learning and teaching creative and challenging.  It is then when she became interested in religious and moral development of children, and, later, in the moral development of adults. Her experience of teaching adults began at the Jesuit Theology Programme in Campion House, Osterley, and it developed through her appointment in 2003 to a part-time lectureship at the Missionary Institute London (Middlessex University and Catholic University Leuven), where until June 2006 she was a core lecturer in Christian Ethics.  In September 2006 Anna joined the faculty staff of Heythrop College.

Current Teaching

Postgraduate modules: ‘Moral Development, Reasoning and Decision Making, ‘Ethical Issues Today’ and ‘Morality and Spirituality’.

Undergraduate module: ‘Philosophical and Religious Ethics’ 

Research Interests

Anna’s main area of research is moral development, its meaning, role and patterns.  In connection with it, she explores the idea of moral failure, especially its conducive or preventative function in the process of moral growth.  She draws primarily from the conceptualisation of moral development within philosophical and psychological discourses, but also from spirituality and the theologies of sin and grace. 
 
Her other academic interests include: narrative ethics, meta-ethics, virtue ethics, comparative religious ethics, corporate social responsibility, media ethics, history of teaching ethics in ancient universities of Europe. 
 
Anna is active in several organizations and institutes.  She is a co-editor of Forum Philosophicum, based at Krakow University School of Philosophy and Education (WSFP Ignatianum).  She is a member of: The Council of Christians and Jews,  Society for the Study of Christian Ethics, Association of Teachers of Moral Theology, Catholic Theological Association of Great Britain, Human Writes (an organisation founded for the purpose of befriending prisoners on Death Row in the USA),  and the Institute of Polish-Jewish Studies.