Millicent Churcher is an associated research fellow at the SFB "Affective Societies" at Freie Universität Berlin. She completed her PhD and a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Sydney. During that time she was awarded a DAAD scholarship and Endeavour research fellowship for her research on moral sentimentalism and social justice. Her book, Reimagining Sympathy, Recognizing Difference: Insights from Adam Smith, was published in 2019 with Rowman and Littlefield International. Millicent’s current research interests include contemporary studies of affect and emotion, social imaginaries, institutions, and social injustice (especially epistemic injustice). Her latest research project, ‘Institutional Transformations: Imagination, Affect, and Embodiment’, explores how institutions can engage the imaginative and affective capacities of social actors in ways that constrain or enable social justice outcomes.

Research Interests

Affect, emotion, and empathy studies

Institutions and institutional transformation

Social imaginary studies

Social and feminist epistemology

Gender and race studies

2019    Churcher, Millicent. Reimagining Sympathy, Recognizing Difference: Insights from
Adam Smith. Rowman and Littlefield International  

2019   Churcher, Millicent and Gatens, Moira ‘Reframing Honour in Heterosexual Imaginaries.’ Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. Vol. 24(4), pp. 151-164.

2019   Churcher, Millicent, Danielle Celermajer, Moira Gatens, and Anna Hush. ‘Institutional Transformations.’ Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. Vol. 24(4), pp. 3-21. Special issue publication on ‘institutional transformation’ (co-edited by Churcher, Celermajer, and Gatens)

2018    Churcher, Millicent. ‘Reimagining the Northern Territory Intervention: Institutional and Cultural Interventions into the Anglo-Australian Imaginary.’ Australian Journal of Social Issues, 53(1), pp. 56-70.

2016    Churcher, Millicent. ‘Can Empathy be a Moral Resource? A Smithean Reply to Jesse Prinz.’ Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review, Vol. 55 (3), pp. 429-447