Clemens Sedmak
Professor of Social Ethics; Director, Nanovic Institute for European Studies

1060E Jenkins Nanovic Halls
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, IN 46556
(574) 631-5253
csedmak1@nd.edu
Clemens Sedmak
Professor of Social Ethics; Director, Nanovic Institute for European Studies
Expertise
Catholic social tradition; social ethics; poverty; theories of justice, epistemology and ethics; philosophy of religion and religious studies
At the Keough School
Clemens Sedmak is professor of social ethics and director of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at the Keough School of Global Affairs.
Courses
- Deep Dive into Diplomacy (undergraduate European studies course)
- Integral Human Development (foundational course for master of global affairs)
- Global Ethics (undergraduate global affairs course)
- Tolerance and Toleration: Introduction to a European discourse (undergraduate European studies course)
- Minor in European Studies Research Capstone
- Serving in Europe: Pre-Departure Seminar (undergraduate)
Biography
Sedmak is a concurrent professor at Notre Dame’s Center for Social Concerns. Before coming to Notre Dame, Sedmak was the FD Maurice Professor for Moral Theology and Social Theology at King’s College London. He has held multiple positions at the University of Salzburg, serving as Director of the Center for Ethics and Poverty Research and Chair for Epistemology and Philosophy of Religion. Sedmak also was President of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Social Ethics in Salzburg.
Sedmak holds doctoral degrees in philosophy, theology and social theory. Born in Austria, he has studied at the University of Innsbruck, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich), Maryknoll (New York) and the University of Linz. He has been a visiting professor at the Jomo Kenyatta University in Nairobi, the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines, the University of Jena in Germany, the Vienna Business University, and the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City.
Research and Publications
Recent Work
- Liu Institute Justice and Asia grant recipient for the project “Learning from the Struggle for Wage Justice in Bangladesh”
- The Capacity to be Displaced: Resilience, Mission, and Inner Strength (Brill, 2017)
- Church of the Poor: Pope Francis and the Transformation of Orthodoxy (Orbis, 2016)