Rebecca Bamford

Rebecca Bamford earned a BA in Combined Studies in Arts (now renamed Liberal Arts) at Durham University, focusing on German, Philosophy, and Russian Studies, where she was also a member of University College. She then completed an MA in Philosophy and a PhD in Philosophy at Durham. Her doctoral thesis, supervised by Professor David E. Cooper, focused on the relationship between art and truth in Nietzsche's works, and developed a new account of Nietzsche's aestheticism and its ethical, metaphysical, and aesthetic implications. 

My research focuses on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, and on 19th century post-Kantian European philosophy. I combine this with work on problems at the intersection of ethics, politics, and the sciences.

I'm an editorial board member of Nietzsche-Studien, and an executive committee member of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society.

I'm currently working on four main research projects:

• The first project focuses on science and values, providing a new account of Nietzsche's experimentalism and the key implications of Nietzsche's thinking on Versuch for ethics and the sciences.
• The second project is a study of Nietzsche's aestheticism, and its influences on Irish modernism.
• The third project focuses on developing an account of how Nietzsche's free spirit project is central to his philosophical development and drives key innovations such as his perspectivism and his critiques of conventional morality and moral philosophy, including into the later works.
• The fourth project develops interventions on disability justice in contemporary society, including on physiotherapy justice, and draws from disability studies, feminist philosophy, phenomenology, and postcolonial theory.

I also conduct general research in applied ethics, especially on contemporary bioethics, environmental and technology issues, drawing on resources from social and political philosophy, and from African philosophy.

Prior to joining Queen's, I held postdoctoral fellowships in the interdisciplinary humanities at Emory University (USA) and in philosophy at Rhodes University (South Africa). I also taught philosophy at the University of Bradford (UK), the University of Minnesota Rochester (USA), Hunter College of the City University of New York (USA), and Quinnipiac University (USA). 

My recent book, Nietzsche's Dawn: Philosophy, Ethics, and the Passion of Knowledge, was co-authored with Keith Ansell-Pearson and was published by Wiley-Blackwell in 2020: https://www.wiley.com/en-gb/Nietzsche's+Dawn:+Philosophy,+Ethics,+and+the+Passion+of+Knowledge-p-9781118957783

I am the editor of Nietzsche's Free Spirit Philosophy, published by Rowman & Littlefield International in 2015: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781783482177/Nietzsches-Free-Spirit-Philosophy

I currently convene the Queen's MA in Philosophy, including the following two MA modules:

• Applied Philosophy
• Global Histories of Philosophy

I also teach in the School-wide module HAP7001, on research ethics (including on the philosophy behind contemporary research ethics).

At undergraduate level, I convene the third-year module Philosophy of Technology and Environment (Spring). I also currently teach on several second-year undergraduate modules, including History of Philosophy in Autumn 2023, in which we attend to philosophy written by less commonly taught philosophers of the early modern period.