Étienne Brown is a Faculty member at the Centre for Law, Technology and Society and an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ottawa.
Dr. Brown’s research examines the ethics and political philosophy of the digital public sphere and new information technologies, including artificial intelligence. His current work examines the ethical implications of states and large digital platforms regulating online discourse, the philosophical underpinnings of recommendation algorithms, and freedom of expression in the age of large language models. In 2026, he received the Faculty of Arts Emerging Researcher of the Year Award.
He is the founder and co-organizer of Philmod.org, a community of academic researchers and technology professionals interested in the philosophical implications of content moderation and social media platform policy. He is also a Senior Research Associate at UCL's Digital Speech Lab and at the African Centre of Excellence for Philosophy of Science and Technology (ACEPS) at the University of Johannesburg. He is co-editor of the forthcoming volume Philosophy of Free Speech: An Introduction (Routledge).
Before joining the University of Ottawa in 2025, Dr. Brown was an assistant professor and then an associate professor at San Jose State University in California. A PhD graduate of Sorbonne University (Paris-IV), he completed two postdoctoral fellowships: the first at the Centre for Research in Ethics (CRÉ) in Montréal and the second, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada, at the Uehiro Institute at the University of Oxford. He was also a visiting researcher at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the University of Pittsburgh.
Dr. Brown is authorized to supervise master's theses, doctoral dissertations, and postdoctoral research. Prospective students interested in political philosophy, the philosophy of law, and the philosophy of technology are welcome to contact him.