Victoria joined Loughborough in 2023 as a Senior Lecturer in Political Philosophy, specialising in feminist philosophy/theory. Prior to this, she lectured at Oxford Brookes University from 2013-2023, and also held the position of Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality at Columbia University, New York, from 2017-2018.
Victoria was awarded her PhD in Philosophy by the University of Liverpool in 2013, and her BA and MA degrees by Soas, University of London. She has won funding awards from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust. To date, Victoria has published six books, and her work appears in various journals including Hypatia: a Journal of Feminist Philosophy and Signs: a Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Victoria has also been on the editorial collective for the journal Radical Philosophy since 2012.
Victoria’s research examines the politics of time and history, and the politics of pregnancy and reproduction, from a feminist philosophical perspective.
Broadly, her work reflects critically on the dominant ways that we imagine, represent and organise time, and offers up alternative visions of how we might do this differently.
Her first book, for example, Feminism, Time and Nonlinear History (2014), explores how feminism can draw productively on its own histories, without passively conforming to expectations of the past, or elevating the past as a nostalgic ideal. The book provides an innovative ‘polytemporal’ account of historical time as multi-layered, multi-linear and multi-directional, and shows how this understanding could enable a more fruitful approach towards feminist histories in the present.
In her more recent research, Victoria turns her attention to the politics and temporalities of the body, and particularly the ways in which pregnancy has been over-associated in the public imagination with birth and the future. Her latest book, Pregnancy Without Birth: A Feminist Philosophy of Miscarriage (2022), critically interrogates discourses and ideologies that elevate birth as pregnancy's 'natural' and 'normal' endpoint, and articulates an alternative philosophy of pregnancy as a fundamentally ambiguous and contingent situation that plays out in multiple ways. In so doing, her ultimate aim is to break down pregnancy hierarchies and presumed divisions between miscarriage, stillbirth, live birth and abortion, in the interest of building inclusive intersectional alliances in the struggle for reproductive justice and freedom for all.
Victoria teaches undergraduate modules in the history of political thought, epistemology, feminist philosophy and gender politics. She also supervises undergraduate dissertations.
- Teresa Melo – Art as activism within the Reproductive Justice movement in Latin America and the Caribbean
- Emily Cousens - Vulnerability and the Feminist Politics of Sexual Violence (awarded 2020)
Selected Books
- Pregnancy Without Birth: A Feminist Philosophy of Miscarriage (Bloomsbury, 2022).
- Vulnerability and the Politics of Care: Transdisciplinary Dialogues, co-edited with Jason Danely and Doerthe Rosenow (British Academy Conference Proceedings series, Oxford University Press, 2021).
- Feminism, Time and Nonlinear History (Palgrave, 2014).
Selected Articles
- ‘Anti-Abortion Feminism: How is this even a thing?’, Radical Philosophy, Issue 213, 2022.
- ‘A Pregnant Pause: Pregnancy, Miscarriage and Suspended Time’, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 37(2), 2022.
- ‘The Politics of Miscarriage’, Radical Philosophy, Issue 203, 2018.
- ‘The Persistence of Patriarchy: Operation Yewtree and the Return to 1970s Feminism’, Radical Philosophy, Issue 188, 2014.
- ‘Backlash, Repetition, Untimeliness: The Temporal Dynamics of Feminist Politics’, Hypatia: a Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Vol. 28 (4), 2013.