Rebecca Bamford

Rebecca Bamford earned four A Levels thanks to her local state comprehensive school, and 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 shows how the history of philosophy can help us respond to contemporary problems. I focus on 19th century post-Kantian European philosophy, with particular emphasis on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. I combine this with work on contemporary 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:

• Science and values: I provide a new account of Nietzsche's experimentalism and the key implications of Nietzsche's thinking on Versuch for ethics and the sciences.
• Nietzsche's aestheticism: I provide a new study of Nietzsche's aestheticism, its significance for understanding Nietzsche's wider philosophy, and its influences on Irish modernism.
• Nietzsche's free spirit project: I offer a new account of how Nietzsche's free spirit project is central to his philosophical development and drives key innovations such as his perspectivism, aspects of his moral psychology, and his critiques of conventional morality and moral philosophy, including into the later works.
• Disability justice in contemporary society: I am developing a series of applied philosophical arguments on disability and mobility justice, including attention to transport accessibility and justice, and physiotherapy justice. This project draws from disability studies, feminist philosophy, phenomenology, and postcolonial theory.

I 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 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

At MA level I teach on the Applied Philosophy module and convene the Virtues, Ethics, and Empires module. I also regularly contribute to the School-wide module HAP7001, focusing on research ethics (including on the philosophy that informs contemporary research ethics).

At undergraduate level, I convene the third-year module Philosophy of Technology and Environment each Spring. I also regularly teach on several second-year undergraduate modules, including History of Philosophy, in which we examine philosophy written by less commonly taught philosophers of the early modern period, including Elisabeth of Bohemia, Margaret Cavendish, and Anton Wilhelm Amo Afer.