Alison Duncan Kerr is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy, with broad research interests in feminist philosophy, the philosophy of gender, sex, and love, logic, theories of rationality, and the philosophy of artificial intelligence.
She has written widely on the emotions, including important pieces on envy in the philosophical tradition, the irrationality of anticipatory guilt, the rationality of emotional regulation, and emotions, rationality, and gender. More recently, she has begun exploring the role of emotions in reaction to algorithms and artificial intelligence. In 2022, she co-authored a piece in Minds and Machine entitled The End of Vagueness: Technological Epistemicism, Surveillance Capitalism and Explainable Artificial Intelligence (with Kevin Scharp).
Professor Kerr received her PhD from the Ohio State University, where she wrote a dissertation entitled “Affective Rationality” under the supervision of Professor Justin D’Arms (chair), Professor William Cunningham, Professor Richard Samuels, and Professor Sigrún Svavarsdóttir. Before that, Professor Kerr received her MA from University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, writing a thesis entitled “Beyond the Meaning of ‘Meaning’: Rigidity and Semantic Externalism.” She spent two years and the University of Oregon, before transferring to get her undergraduate degree from Smith College.
In addition to her post-graduate work in philosophy, which she continued as a Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews, Professor Kerr was the Founding Director of The St Andrews Institute for Gender Studies and its related Master’s Programme and contributed to groundbreaking equality work in Higher Education at the The Work Inclusion Project.