Rate My Professor Miriam Bankovsky

Miriam Bankovsky (she/her) is Associate Professor in Politics and Head of the Department of Politics, Media and Philosophy in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at La Trobe University. She serves as course coordinator for the Bachelor of Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (PPE) and teaches into the PPE program and the Philosophy major. Her subjects include introductory and advanced Politics, Philosophy and Economics (POL1PPE, POL2PPE), and Political Theory (PHI3POT, POL3POT), examining the contributions of these disciplines to understanding societal and economic interactions.

Bankovsky earned her PhD in 2009 from the University of New South Wales, where her thesis on social justice after Kant—drawing on constructivist and deconstructive perspectives in Rawls, Habermas, and Honneth—won the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Best Doctoral Thesis Prize. Her research centers on political philosophy, spanning analytic and continental traditions, ethics, and the history of economic thought. She received an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) for her projects. Key publications include her monograph Perfecting Justice in Rawls, Habermas and Honneth: A Deconstructive Perspective (2012), Recognition Across French-German Divides: The Social Fabric of Freedom in French Theory (2021), and Economics and the Family: A Social and Political History (2025), which analyzes economists' approaches to family poverty from the nineteenth century to the present. Other significant works are 'Alfred Marshall’s household economics: the role of the family in cultivating an ethical capitalism' (2019), 'Excusing economic envy: On injustice and impotence' (2018), and 'Recognition theory and contemporary French moral and political philosophy: Reopening the dialogue' (2024). Bankovsky contributes to the Care Economy Research Institute at La Trobe and has written on academic freedom and ARC grant processes. As department head, she oversees research aligned with university themes in social change.