Kate Soper

Kate Soper is emerita professor of philosophy and a former researcher with the Institute for the Study of European Transformations at London Metropolitan University.

Soper has published widely on theory of need and consumption, feminism, green politics, and environmental philosophy. She has had a long association with Radical Philosophy and has been a regular columnist for the U.S.-based journal, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, and an editorial collective member and writer for New Left Review. She has translated works by, among others, Sebastiano Timpanaro, Noberto Bobbio, Michel Foucault, Cornelius Castoriadis, and Carlo Ginsburg.

Her books include On Human Needs (Harvester Press, 1981); Humanism and Anti-Humanism (Hutchinson, 1986); Troubled Pleasures: Writings on Politics, Gender and Hedonism (Verso,1990); What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human (Blackwell, 1995, reprinted 1998, 2000, 2001), and Post-Growth Living: for an Alternative Hedonism (Verso 2020). With Martin Ryle, she is co-author of To Relish the Sublime? Culture and Self-Realization in Postmodern Times (Verso, 2002); and co-editor, along with Lyn Thomas, of The Politics and Pleasures of Consuming Differently (Palgrave, 2008).

She was lead researcher in the project “Alternative Hedonism, and the theory and politics of consumption,” funded in the ESRC/AHRC Cultures of Consumption project, conducted in 2004–06. Most recently, as a visiting fellow at the Pufendorf Institute at Lund University, she has been involved in a number of research projects on climate change and sustainable consumption.