Toni Alimi has been at Cornell since 2021 as a Klarman Fellow and is very pleased to be joining Bethe as a House Fellow in Fall '23. His research and teaching span ancient Roman philosophy (specializing in Lactantius and Augustine), intellectual history (focusing on freedom, slavery, law, rule, and authority), contemporary ethics and politics (idem), and philosophy of religion. Toni's current book project, Slaves of God, explicates Augustine’s reasons for justifying slavery and argues that slavery is a central theme in his broader ethics and politics.

Toni is in the early stages of research for a broader intellectual history of slavery (tentatively titled Precarious: Retributive Slavery and the Rights of Citizens), which will trace the development of ideas of natural and retributive slavery from their ancient Greek and Roman provenances through late antiquity, medieval and early modern Christianity, into the antebellum United States. 

As a Klarman Fellow (2021-2024), Toni is postdoctoral associate in Classics with an affiliate appointment in Philosophy. Before Cornell, he earned a Ph.D. in Religion, Ethics, and Politics from Princeton University, M.A.R. in Ethics from Yale Divinity School, and A.B. in Religion from Princeton University. Toni will begin as an Assistant Professor in Cornell's Sage School of Philosophy in 2024.