Stacie Friend is a Reader in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. She previously taught at Birkbeck from 2005-2007 and again from 2014-2023, having taught in between at Heythrop College, University of London. Her research is at the intersection of aesthetics, language and mind, especially as these pertain to our engagement with works of fiction.
Friend is currently an Editor of the journal Analysis and until recently the President of the British Society of Aesthetics (2018 to 2024). She has also directed the interdisciplinary research project ‘Art Opening Minds: Imagination and Perspective in Film’, funded by the Templeton Religion Trust (2022-2023), and been a co-investigator on a three-year Leverhulme Trust research project on ‘Learning from Fiction’ (2018-2022).
Friend previously lectured at Washington & Jefferson College in Washington, Pennsylvania (2003-05) and at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow (2002-03). She received her PhD in Philosophy from Stanford University in 2002.
Stacie has been a Visiting Professor at the Collège de France (Paris), the Institut Jean-Nicod/Ecole normale supérieure (Paris), the LOGOS Research Group at the University of Barcelona and the Aesthetics Department at the University of Uppsala. She was a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellow in 2013-14.
