Quill Kukla

Quill Kukla (previously known as Rebecca Kukla) is a Canadian and American philosopher. They are a Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University and the Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. In 2020 and 2021, they were Humboldt Research Scholar at Leibniz University Hannover. They are known for their work in bioethics, analytic epistemology, philosophy of language, and feminist philosophy.

Biography
Kukla received their bachelor's degree in philosophy at the University of Toronto in 1990, and their PhD in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, where their supervisor was John Haugeland. Kukla held various academic appointments in the United States and Canada before taking up their current post at Georgetown; these include Johns Hopkins University, Queen's University at Kingston, Carleton University (where they held a tenured appointment), and the University of South Florida. At the latter, they were professor in both the Department of Philosophy and in the School of Medicine. Kukla is Editor-in-Chief of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal and former Editor-in-Chief of Public Affairs Quarterly. They were formerly co-coordinator of the Feminist Approaches to Bioethics Network. They completed a master's degree in geography at Hunter College in 2019.

Kukla has been interviewed about their work in various venues, including 3AM, Washington Post, Huffington Post, Slate, and Quartz. Their work on historical, cultural, and political attitudes towards bodies, especially those of mothers and pregnant women—found in their book, Mass Hysteria: Medicine, Culture, and Mothers' Bodies—has led to their being interviewed and authoring media articles on topics including the culture of pregnancy, sexual fetish, and attitudes towards race and obesity. They are a vocal defender of women, ethnic minorities, and other minorities, especially in academia, and have been interviewed in the media on this topic.

They have won national and state-level medals in powerlifting.

Publications
Books


 * Q. R Kukla, City Living: How Urban Spaces and Urban Dwellers Make One Another (New York: Oxford University Press 2021).


 * R. Kukla and M. Lance, 'Yo!' and 'Lo!': The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2009).


 * R. Kukla, Mass Hysteria: Medicine, Culture and Mothers' Bodies (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield 2005).

Edited books


 * J. Arras, R. Kukla, and E. Fenton, ed. The Routledge Companion to Bioethics (Routledge 2012).


 * R. Kukla, ed. Aesthetics and Cognition in Kant's Critical Philosophy (Cambridge University Press 2006).

Dissertation

Rebecca Kukla, Conformity, Creativity, and the Social Constitution of the Subject (Department of Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh: 1995).