Kate Wininger, emerita

Professor Wininger was a professor of philosophy and women and gender studies for 33 years. She also taught liberal studies in the humanities. 

Professor Kathleen J. Wininger is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern Maine.  Her Ph.D. in Philosophy is from Temple University. There she also did graduate work in the History of Art.  She did graduate work in Ethics and Continental Philosophy in Bryn Mawr College’s Ph. D. program.   Dr. Wininger holds two Bachelor of Arts degrees, one in Philosophy and one in Art History from Southern Connecticut State University.  In New Haven she did an additional semester in Philosophy at Yale University.  

Professor Wininger writes and publishes primarily in the areas of philosophy of the late nineteenth and twentieth-century.  Her works include articles on ethical theory, Friedrich Nietzsche’s moral and aesthetic theories, de-colonization, and the ethical implications of European visual portrayals of colonized people.  Philosophy and Sex edited with Robert Baker of Union College was the first major anthology on philosophical perspectives on sex,  and love of its time; she edited the 3rd and 4th volumes including more nuanced texts on gender.   Her first book, Nietzsche and the Reclamation of Philosophy, was published by Rodopi and is now carried by Brill. 

A frequent visitor to East and southern Africa, Professor Wininger has been a guest Lecturer at the University of Nairobi and was a delegate to the Pan-African Symposium in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Recently she has worked in Southern Africa, especially on SA/Botswanan writer Bessie Head.   She consulted for the Southern and Eastern African Centre for Women’s Law at the University of Zimbabwe, and has most recently been working in the National Archives of Namibia in Windhoek and the Sam Cohen Library, Swakopmund.  

Professor Wininger taught courses in Aesthetics, Film Theory, African Philosophy and Exile, and African Literature and Film.  In addition to her appointment at USM, Professor Wininger has taught at Temple University, Delaware State College, Union College, and  Earlham College.