Helen Nissenbaum is Associate Professor in the Department of Culture and Communication and a Senior Fellow of the Information Law Institute, New York University. She specializes in social, ethical, and political dimensions of information technology. Her published works on privacy, property rights, electronic publication, accountability, the use of computers in education, and values embodied in computer systems have appeared in scholarly journals of philosophy, applied ethics, law, and computer science. She is author of Emotion and Focus (University of Chicago Press), co-editor (with D.J. Johnson) of Computers, Ethics and Social Values (Prentice-Hall), and a founding co-editor of the journal, Ethics and Information Technology (Kluwer Academic Press). Grants from the National Science Foundation and Ford Foundation have supported her research and she has served on committees of the National Academy of Sciences, National Science Foundation, UNESCO, AAAS, and the ACM.
Before joining NYU, Nissenbaum was a Member of the School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Associate Director of Princeton University Center for Human Values, and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University. She earned a B.A. (Honors) from the University of Witwatersand, Johannesburg and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford University.