Heather Widdows | |
|---|---|
| Born | 29 August 1972 |
| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater | University of Edinburgh (BD, PhD) |
| Notable work | Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal |
| Spouse(s) | Professor Matthew Hilton, Vice-Principal for Humanities and Social Sciences, Queen Mary University of London |
| Awards | Charles Beale Award for Policy Advancement (2013) |
| Institutions | University of Edinburgh Imperial College, London University of Birmingham University of Warwick |
Main interests | Ethics, Policy and governance issues in particular: • Beauty, Everyday Lookism, Public health Crises • Global Ethics, Moral Theory • Feminist Theory, Women's rights • Bioethics, Reproductive Technologies, Medical Tourism, Genetic Ethics and Governance • War on Terror, Global Justice |
| Website | https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/philosophy/people/summaries/widdows/ https://everydaylookism.bham.ac.uk |
Heather Widdows (born 29 August 1972) is a British philosopher, specialising in applied ethics. She was at the University of Birmingham for 22 years, beginning as research fellow and finishing as Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research and Knowledge Transfer).[1] She is currently a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Warwick.[2] Her research is in the areas of global ethics, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of health and bioethics. In 2005, she was awarded a visiting fellowship at Harvard University.
Her most recent book, Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal (Princeton University Press, 2018), explores how the nature of the beauty ideal is changing - becoming more dominant, demanding and global than ever before.[3] Widdows argues that to address the harms caused by the beauty ideal, we must first understand its ethical nature. Vogue described the book as "groundbreaking",[4] and writer and journalist Bri Lee included Perfect Me in her article Books That Changed Me.[5]