Dr Emily Brady, Texas A&M University

I have been a Professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M University since 2018. From 2018-2022, as Director of the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research , I held the Center’s first endowed chair, the Susanne M. and Melbern G. Glasscock Director’s Chair. Before coming to Texas, I was Professor of Environment and Philosophy in the Institute of Geography and the Lived Environment at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. I began my career spending ten years in the Philosophy Department at Lancaster University in England.

My research and teaching interests span aesthetics and philosophy of art, environmental ethics, eighteenth-century philosophy, environmental humanities, and animal studies. My philosophical and interdisciplinary approach moves between the historical and contemporary, as I seek to interpret past thinking about nature, environment, and the arts for a contemporary context.

In current research, I explore interactions between aesthetics and ethics, specifically through other-regarding attitudes toward the natural world, e.g., forms of aesthetic attention, humility, wonder, natural beauty, and the sublime. Lately, I have been writing about aesthetics and climate change, as well as editing a major handbook on the sublime for Oxford University Press, alongside co-editors, Patrick Cheney and Philip Hardie. In earlier work, I focused on the place of imagination, perception, and emotion in aesthetic experience of environment. Many moons ago, I wrote my PhD dissertation on  the topic of pictorial representation and imagination. 

I have published seven books:  Between Nature and Culture: The Aesthetics of Modified Environments (with Isis Brook and Jonathan Prior, Rowman and Littlefield International, 2018);  The Sublime in Modern Philosophy (Cambridge UP, 2013); Human-Environment Relations: Transformative Values in Theory and Practice (co-edited with Pauline Phemister, Springer, 2012); Humans in the Land: The Aesthetics and Ethics of the Cultural Landscape (co-edited with Sven Arntzen, Oslo Academic Press, 2008); Aesthetics of the Natural Environment (Edinburgh UP, 2003); Aesthetic Concepts: Essays After Sibley (co-edited with Jerrold Levinson, Oxford UP, 2001); Environment and Philosophy (Vernon Pratt with Emily Brady and Jane Howarth, Routledge, 2000). Various publications of mine have been translated into Chinese, French, Finnish, German, Icelandic, or Spanish.

I am a past President and Vice-President of the International Society for Environmental Ethics and have served on the Executive Committees of the Royal Institute of Philosophy and the British Society of Aesthetics, as well as having been a Trustee of the American Society of Aesthetics. Currently, I serve on the International Advisory Boards of the International Institute of Applied Aesthetics and the Center for Animal Ethics and on the editorial boards of Ethics, Policy, and Environment; Plant Perspectives: An Interdisciplinary Journal; and Studi di Estetica. Previously, I was Associate Editor of Environmental Values and Co-Editor of Society and Space. I’m an Honorary Partner of the Everyday Aesthetics Network and an invited member of the Consortium of Environmental Philosophers.

I have held visiting positions in the Philosophy Department at the University of Pennsylvania (2010); as a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellow at  Princeton’s University Center for Human Values (2011-2012); as a Sabbatical Fellow at the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (2015); and as a Visiting Professor in the Philosophy and Communication Studies Department at the University of Bologna (2023).

While I was Director of the Glasscock Center, I created and led the interdisciplinary research initiative Humanities: Land Sea Space. While at the University of Edinburgh, I was a founding member of the Edinburgh Environmental Humanities Network. My research has been supported by funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy, the Finnish Academy, DEFRA, the National Endowment for the Humanities, COST, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, and the British Council.