Lauren Freeman

Lauren Freeman has been a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Louisville since 2013. She is also an affiliated faculty member in Women’s and Gender Studies, a core member of the M.A. in Health Care Ethics, a collaborator with the University of Louisville’s School of Medicine’s eQuality Project, and a former collaborator with the Center for Mental Health Disparities (which was housed in the Department of Psychology). She has research interests in feminist bioethics, philosophy of medicine, feminist philosophy, phenomenology, philosophy of emotion, and philosophical pedagogy. She has written articles on epistemic injustice in medicine, and the problems of relying on sex categories in medical contexts, and has launched a feminist critique of research on the placental microbiome as well as the media coverage of that research. She’s also written on stereotype threat, the phenomenology of racial oppression, and implicit bias.

Professor Freeman’s research has appeared in journals such as Inquiry, The Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, The Southern Journal of Philosophy, The APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy, The International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, Philosophy Compass, Continental Philosophy Review, Hypatia, The Review of Metaphysics, and The American Journal of Bioethics. She was also interviewed by Nature. Professor Freeman has been invited to speak at Harvard University, Princeton University, the University of Toronto’s School of Medicine, Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia), the University of Vienna, and the University of Memphis.

Professor Freeman has co-edited (with Andreas Elpidorou) a special issue of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences on the topic of the phenomenology and science of emotions and has edited a special issue of the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics on the topic of feminist phenomenological approaches to bioethics, medicine, and health. She is the coeditor (with Jeanine Weekes Schroer) of Microaggressions and Philosophy (Routledge, 2020) and is writing a book (with Heather Stewart) called Microaggressions in Clinical Medicine. She is on the American Philosophical Association Committee on the Status of Women and is the editor of The American Philosophical Association’s Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy.

Professor Freeman’s research has been supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the University of Louisville’s Commonwealth Center for Humanities and Society (2016-2017), and The Cooperative Consortium for Transdisciplinary Social Justice Research (2017-2019), H.B. Earhart Foundation, Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, and Emory University Institute for the History of Philosophy.

In both 2015 and 2017, Professor Freeman won a Faculty Favorite Award for her teaching at the University of Louisville’s Delphi Center for Teaching and Learning. Links to Professor Freeman’s published works can be found