Biography
I joined the department as a lecturer in September 2025. Previously, I was a senior lecturer at Uppsala University in Sweden. I remain a docent there, though I'm still unsure what that means. I work on aesthetics, imagination, philosophy of mind, and feminist philosophy.
Before moving to Uppsala, I was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellow at the Centre for Philosophical Psychology at the University of Antwerp. I've also worked in Auburn (AL, USA), Porto Alegre (Brazil) and Leeds (UK). My PhD is from the University of Miami (FL, USA). I grew up in North-East England.
Research areas
My published research work falls mostly into two categories: pieces on imagination and pieces on aesthetics.
On imagination, I’ve been gradually coalescing my thought into a fairly heterodox view. The two best pieces for seeing what that view is are “Imagination as a Process” (open access) and “Imagination: A Lens, Not A Mirror” (also open access). These together constitute a programmatic sketch of a view on which imagination is a lens-like mental process, not a belief-like mental state (as the orthodox view has it). My main project at the moment is writing a book that fills in the sketch and explores the view's applications in aesthetics. The other imagination articles all bear some relation to this view, though sometimes an oblique one.
On aesthetics, there’s no central theme, just a selection of articles on such things as pop and dance music, expression theory, and aesthetics as a sub-discipline. The most splashy paper is probably “The Aesthetic Constitution of Genders” (open access), which brings together a way of reading literature on social ontology and recent work on aesthetic practice to explore the ways in which aesthetic practices construct genders. I'm continuing to think about these issues, in a fairly unstructured way, and also separately wondering whether I have anything interesting to say about aesthetic normativity.
That gender paper also illustrates how feminist philosophy, or philosophy of race and gender, figures in my work: not so much as a primary focus, more of a methodological and thematic orientation. The other paper that illustrates this best is “Understanding What It’s Like To Be (Dis)Privileged”, which again is open access.
Selected publications
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Open access
The aesthetic constitution of genders
Wiltsher, N., 18 Jul 2024, In: Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy. 11, n/a, p. 516-548 33 p.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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Open access
Aesthetic selves as objects of interpersonal understanding
Wiltsher, N., 2 May 2024, In: Philosophical Explorations. 27, 2, p. 212-224Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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Open access
Imagination as a process
Wiltsher, N., 8 May 2023, In: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 106, 2, p. 434-454 21 p.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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Open access
Understanding what it's like to be (dis)privileged
Wiltsher, N., 4 Jun 2021, In: Pacific Philosophical Quarterly. 102, 2, p. 320-356 37 p.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review