Carmen Puchinger

Carmen Puchinger is a PhD Candidate and Researcher at the Ethics Institute within the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht University's Faculty of Humanities. She is working on the research project "Theorizing Freedom from Below" funded by a VIDI Grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and led by Dr. Dorothea Gädeke.

Her research interests include:

• Critical Theory
• Feminist Philosophy
• Political Philosophy
• Political Theory
• Phenomenology
• Feminism
• History of Work

Her doctoral thesis focuses on developing a Critical theory of republican freedom with special attention to the lived experience of (resisting) class-based domination. Her work critically engages with the republican tradition of political thought, challenging its focus on the perspective of the free citizen by instead centering the experiences of those struggling against various forms of domination, including race-based, gender-based, and class-based domination.

She has been recognized for her scholarly work, receiving the Gender Prize by the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences of the University of Hamburg in 2022 for her master's thesis "Bloody Hell: Understanding the struggles of capitalist-patriarchal corporeality with Adorno and Horkheimer– a feminist critique of menstruation with and against Critical Theory."

Prior to her position at Utrecht University, Carmen Puchinger served as a lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Hamburg, where she taught seminars on feminist criticism of canonical philosophy and feminist history of political ideas.