Elizabeth Barnes


Elizabeth Barnes is an American philosopher working in feminist philosophy, metaphysics, social philosophy and ethics. Barnes is a professor of philosophy at the Corcoran Department of Philosophy, University of Virginia.

Biography

Barnes was born in Asheville, North Carolina, and was raised around Charlotte, North Carolina. Barnes holds a bachelor's degree from the Davidson College, where she graduated magna cum laude, and a master's degree and PhD from the University of St Andrews, where she studied under Katherine Hawley and Daniel Nolan. After graduating from St Andrews, Barnes held posts in the philosophy department at the University of Leeds from 2006, before joining the faculty at Virginia in 2014. In 2012, she became editor-in-chief of the journal Philosophy Compass.
Barnes has published across various fields in philosophy, and edited a volume entitled Current Controversies in Metaphysics, which was published with Routledge in 2015. In 2016, her monograph The Minority Body was published with Oxford University Press. In the book, Barnes challenges the view of disability common in analytic philosophy, arguing instead that it is primarily a social phenomenon. Disabled persons, she argues, are not intrinsically worse off in virtue of being disabled, even though disability can be, in a restricted sense, a harm.

Personal life

She is married to the Scottish philosopher Ross Cameron; the pair met at St Andrews, and Cameron is also a professor at Virginia.

Selected publications

Books