Prof. Kate Moran, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, near Boston. She arrived at Brandeis after completing her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 2008.

Her research focuses on Immanuel Kant, with an emphasis on his ethical and legal philosophy. Monographs on Kant’s moral philosophy include Community and Progress in Kant’s Moral Philosophy (Catholic University Press, 2012) and Kant’s Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2022). She is particularly interested in the nuances of interpersonal relations in Kant’s ethics and legal theory, and in this vein she has published essays on Kant’s account of gratitude and generational injustice. She has also published several essays on Kant’s account of education and moral development. More recently, she has been working on a project that describes a Kantian account of aesthetic education. 

Kate Moran is an avid seamstress, and her monograph A Philosopher Looks at Clothes was published by Cambridge University Press in 2025. That book considers clothing from several philosophical standpoints – discussions include the aesthetics of clothing, the communicative potential of clothing, cultural appropriation, children’s clothing, and the ethics of clothing production. At the Centre for Advanced Study, she will be researching the ethical and aesthetic implications of fast fashion and the digital marketing of clothing.  

Kate Moran was a recipient of the Charlotte Newcombe dissertation fellowship from the Society for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation) in 2007. She was a Humboldt Fellow at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena from 2015 to 2016. In 2020/2021, she was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Greifswald, Germany.