Margaret A Fife

Maggie Fife is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She earned her PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2025 and her M.A. from Northern Illinois University in 2017. Fife's research areas are ethics, social epistemology, and feminist philosophy. Recently, her research has focused on the roles of hope and moral imagination in political activism.

Education

PhD in Philosophy, CUNY Graduate Center, 2025.
M.A. in Philosophy, Northern Illinois University, 2017.
B.A. in Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2011.

Specialization in Teaching

Fife's teaching covers the fields of ethics (including business ethics, global ethics, and general ethical theory courses), epistemology (social and traditional epistemology), feminist philosophy, and political philosophy. She has taught upper division courses on topics at the intersection of ethics, political philosophy, and feminist philosophy.

Research Interests

Fife's research focuses on the intersection of ethics and epistemology. Specifically, she is interested in how our social and political lives shape what we know about morality.

Fife's most recent project investigates the relationship between hope and moral imagination and the role of each in political activism. She argues that engaging one’s imagination can shape the conditions of possibility, thus partially determining what can happen. Through exploring the nature of hope (both individual and collective) and responding to serious criticism of political hope and pessimism about moral progress, she argues that some form of hope is necessary for motivating political activism. Her work focuses on utopian political movements, in particular, the movement for prison abolition. Fife argues utopian political thought is needed address structural injustice built on naturalized concepts.

She is also interested in issues of collective emotion, moral responsibility, justification for punishment, and moral revolutions.