Aleksandra Hernandez

Aleksandra Hernandez (Ph.D., Notre Dame) is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami, where her work lies at the intersection of philosophy and literature. She specializes in animal ethics, pragmatism, and moral psychology, with competences in philosophy of psychiatry and feminist epistemology. Her research engages questions in animal ethics, moral psychology, American pragmatism, and feminist philosophy. Hernandez earned her Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame in 2018, an M.A. from the University of Toronto in 2011, and a B.A. with Distinction from the University of Toronto in 2008. Her academic career includes serving as Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of English at the University of Miami from 2018 to 2022, during which she was also Affiliated Faculty in the Department of Philosophy from 2020 to 2022. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English at the University of Notre Dame from 2017 to 2018.

Key publications include “Pragmatist Feminist Utopias: Gilman, Mead, and the Problem of Choice” (Hypatia, 2022), “Disgust, Antebellum Vegetarianism, and the Human Animal in Thoreau’s ‘Higher Laws’” (Arizona Quarterly, 2022), “Jack London’s Poetic Animality and the Problem of Domestication” (Journal of Modern Literature, 2021), “Epistemic Oppression and Affective Exclusion: A Pragmatist Approach” (Passion, 2023), “Rethinking Wilderness: Wendell Berry, Philip K. Dick, and the Absence of the Wild” (ISLE, 2023), and “Imagination, Ethics, and Epistemic Inquiry: Why Teaching Literature and Film in the Philosophy Classroom Matters” (Journal of Philosophy in Schools, 2025). Forthcoming works include “John Dewey, Humanism, and the Value of Science” in Science and Humanism (Cambridge University Press, 2025) and “‘Thoughts the Body Thought’: Thoreau, Thinking, and Metaphor,” co-authored with Laura Dassow Walls for The Oxford Handbook of Henry David Thoreau (2026). She is developing a book project titled Animal Values: A Pragmatist Ethic for Our Relationship with Animals. Hernandez has received the Humanities Center Faculty Fellowship (University of Miami, AY 2023-2024), Quarry Farm Fellowship (Center for Mark Twain Studies, 2021), Engaged Faculty Fellowship (University of Miami, 2020-2021), and Bruns Graduate Essay Prize (Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, 2013). She has presented at conferences including the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy (2024), Canadian Philosophical Association (2024), and Women in Pragmatism Conference (2023).