Michaila Peters

I am a fourth-year PhD Student and Teaching Fellow in Philosophy at Boston College. There, I founded and direct the Public Philosophy Initiative, for which I was awarded the Ann Forest Morgan Award. I am also the current director of Corrupt the Youth-Boson. I am currently a Research Fellow at the Emotion and Society Lab at UC Riverside, and at the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy at Boston College. This November, I will also serve as a delegate with Boston College’s delegation to the UN COP29 Meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan.

I received my BA in Political Science and Philosophy in 2021 from the American University School of Public Affairs Honors Program. I  also completed minor studies in Economics and received certificates in Community-Based Research and Leadership and Ethical Development. In my last semester, I studied at the University of Toronto as a Fulbright Killam Fellow. I am originally from Cambridge Springs, PA. 

I specialize in feminist philosophy, social and political philosophy, and have interests in feminist pragmatism, the history of non-violent theory, social epistemology, critical phenomenology, hermeneutics, and the philosophy of education. As an Appalachian feminist, my research adopts a feminist perspective to better understand the complex relationship between rural poverty and political extremism and hyper-polarization in the United States. Mediating theory, community and policy spaces, my research also draws on interdisciplinary participatory action research, ethnographic and empirical methodologies. More details about my research can be found here.

I have taught undergraduates in Philosophy for three years, instructing or assisting in courses in ethics, the history of philosophy, and service-learning. In 2024, I received the Donald J. White Teaching Excellence Award from the Boston College Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE). I was also awarded an NEH fellowship to the Northeast Workshop on Multicultural Philosophy (NEWLAMP) on indigenous philosophy.

In my free time, I enjoy drawing and painting and hangin with my pet bunny.

You can contact me at petersxg [at symbol] bc [dot] edu. I use pronouns she/her