Bio

Victoria McGeer divides her time between Princeton University (northern fall semester) and the Australian National University (northern spring semester).  At Princeton, she is tenured as a Senior Research Scholar in the University Center for Human Values, with teaching duties in Philosophy.  At the ANU, she has a continuing appointment as Professor in the School of Philosophy, College of Arts and Sciences.

In 1993, as an assistant professor in the philosophy department at Vanderbilt University, she won the Royal Society of Canada’s Alice Wilson Award for postdoctoral research. With support from the Canadian government, she took special research leave to explore how developmental questions affect theoretical work in philosophy of mind and moral psychology, and spent two years at the lab of developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik at the University of California, Berkeley. After leaving Vanderbilt to pursue an interdisciplinary research program on the development of social cognition and its disorders, she became a senior member of the McDonnell Project in Philosophy and the Neurosciences in 2001 and joined the Center for Human Values at Princeton in 2004.

She has published a number of papers in prestigious journals that reflect her wide range of interests, encompassing topics in moral psychology, the development of agential capacities and its impairments, responsibility, the nature of folk-psychological explanation, problems of self-knowledge, and the metaphysics of mind. Her paper, “Mind-making practices: the social infrastructure of self-knowing agency and responsibility” was selected for inclusion in The Philosopher’s Annual as one of the ten best philosophy articles in 2015.

McGeer received an honours B.A. in government and philosophy from Dartmouth College and her M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Toronto.