Rate My Professor Kathleen Stock

Kathleen Stock is a British philosopher who served as Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex from 2003 until her resignation in 2021. She previously held teaching positions at the University of Lancaster and the University of East Anglia. Stock earned her doctorate from the University of Leeds in 2001, with a thesis examining the nature and value of imaginative responses to the fiction film.

Her academic work has focused on areas including aesthetics, fiction, imagination, sexual objectification and sexual orientation. Stock is the author of Only Imagine: Fiction, Interpretation and Imagination, published by Oxford University Press in 2017, and Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism, published by Little, Brown in 2021. She was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to education. Stock has been recognised in public discourse, including being voted the world’s top thinker by Prospect Magazine in 2022 and receiving a highly commended award for her columns at the UK Press Awards in 2024.