Joseph Karaganis
Joseph Karaganis
Joseph Karaganis, from New York City, studies philosophy, political science, and history at Columbia University, with a focus on the theoretical foundations and moral implications of artificial intelligence. As a Laidlaw Scholar, Joseph spent one summer interviewing journalists about the use of large language models in newsrooms and another conducting comparative AI policy research at the University of Amsterdam’s Institute for Information Law. With Columbia’s Incite Institute, he has supported projects covering the Obama administration’s foreign policy and the development and consolidation of civil society networks in Eastern Europe and the Balkans during the 1990s and 2000s. Last summer, he interned for the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt, Germany, where he studied the relationship between Neo-Kantian social theory and 20th-century American legal positivism.
Joseph is passionate about education and has taught political philosophy to high schoolers through the Freedom and Citizenship program and to incarcerated students on Rikers Island through Columbia’s Justice-in-Education Initiative. He was awarded the 2025 James P. Shenton Prize in Contemporary Civilization for writing the best paper in a course taken by all second-year Columbia College students. He also chairs the Lionel Trilling Book Award, serves as a student representative to Columbia’s Committee on the Core Curriculum, and was formerly co-director of the Columbia Political Union’s Reachout Initiative and a managing editor for the Columbia Political Review.
As a Marshall Scholar, Joseph plans to pursue a BPhil in Philosophy at the University of Oxford.