Justina Torrance

Justina Torrance

Justina Torrance (Ph.D., Harvard University; M.A., Stanford University; B.A., Stanford University in psychology, with distinction) is currently an academic-term lecturer at Santa Clara University (SCU). She works on ethics, moral and political psychology, and religion in nineteenth-century U.S. American literature.

She is this year’s recipient of the Melville Society’s Hennig Cohen Prize for her contribution to A New Companion to Herman Melville (Wiley-Blackwell, 2022). Her other publications include pieces on William James in the Cambridge Handbook of Ethics and Education (Cambridge UP, 2024) and William James Studies, for which she received the WJS Young Scholar Award in 2020.

Currently she is working on a digital humanities project for Melville’s Marginalia Online and a book project, based on her dissertation, that addresses pragmatism, faith, and democracy in nineteenth-century America.

For her teaching, she has received multiple certificates of distinction from Harvard’s Office of Undergraduate Education, and she was nominated by her department for one of Harvard’s most distinguished teaching awards, the Derek C. Bok Award. At SCU, she offers courses on religion and literature (RSOC 52) and the Christian tradition (TESP 4).