Kirstine La Cour

I am currently the Career Development Fellow in Philosophy at Trinity College Oxford. 

I hold a BA from King’s College London and an MPhil and PhD from University College London. 

My graduate training was funded by the Keeling Centre, the AHRC LAHP, the Royal Institute of Philosophy, and the Society for Applied Philosophy. I have also held a one-year Research Excellence Scholarship for Cross-disciplinary Training in UCL Linguistics, and have twice visited the Philosophy Department at Yale University.

I am Danish and grew up in Denmark.

In the academic year 2025/2026, I will be teaching Trinity students a variety of subjects including Logic, Ethics, and Feminist Theory. 

Prior to this, I have taught a wide range of subjects in Philosophy at University College London and London School of Economics, including in the latter’s Master of Public Policy Programme.

I specialise in Social Philosophy, with research spanning across Moral Psychology, Ethics, and Epistemology, and additional interests in Political Philosophy and Philosophy of Language and Mind. My research typically takes its starting point in everyday communicative practices (protesting, apologising, arguing, etc), and considers the roles these play in facilitating interpersonal relationships, normative understanding, and the expression and development of our identities as agents. 

My doctoral project, The Pursuit of Repair, considers the possibility and desirability of interpersonal moral repair in the face of past wrongdoing. Whereas a dominant strain of philosophical thought has cast this as a problem of redistributive justice, I propose that repair is best understood as an open-ended and creative pursuit of mutual understanding. My next project considers how conflictual communication can drive normative development.

Much of my research to date draws from empirical work on communication, and particularly from the methods and insights of the field known as conversation analysis. I remain deeply interested in what philosophy can learn from and contribute to its disciplinary neighbours, particularly in the Social and Psychological sciences, Law, and Public Policy.