Kate Soper


Kate Soper is a British philosopher. She is currently Visiting Professor at the University of Brighton.

Background

Soper was educated at the University of Oxford and worked as a translator and journalist. Her PhD was from Sussex University. She taught at Sussex before moving to the University of North London in 1987. She taught a range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses in European Studies and Literature and Modernity.
She retired c.2009, becoming Emeritus Professor.

Contributions

Soper is the author of and contributor to over a dozen books on feminism and Continental Philosophy, addressing the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, Karl Marx and Simone de Beauvoir, among others. Her other main contributions have been to consumption theory and environmental philosophy. She is known to be a critic of post-structuralist feminism.
She has also translated several texts into English, including includes Chiodi’s Sartre And Marxism, Sebastiano Timpanaro’s The Freudian Slip, Bobbio’s Liberalism And Democracy, and Ginzburg’s Wooden Eyes.
She has been involved in several environmentalist and peace movements in both the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe and her writing addresses radical ecological issues. She regularly contributed columns or editorial content to the journals Radical Philosophy, New Left Review and Capitalism, Nature, Socialism and, in 1998, interviewed Noam Chomsky. Her study of the role that new thinking about pleasure and the ‘good life’ can play in promoting sustainable consumption was funded in the
ESRC/AHRC ‘Cultures of Consumption’ Programme in the mid 2000s.
Her other work includes radio and television appearances, and a number of exhibitions.

Selected works