Emine Hande Tuna
Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Santa Cruz
Fellow 2025–26
- Current Project
- Imaginative Resistance
- Project Discipline
- Philosophy
- Fellowship Title
- Philip L. Quinn Fellowship
About Fellow
Emine Hande Tuna is a philosopher who spends her time thinking seriously about things that don’t exist—like square circles, guilt-free villains, and moral worlds where injustice counts as good. She’s an assistant professor of philosophy at University of California, Santa Cruz, where she writes and teaches about imagination, aesthetics, and why some stories just won’t sit right with us. Her first book, Kantian Art Criticism, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, and her work has appeared in journals including The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Analysis, and the European Journal of Philosophy. She is also the recipient of the John Fisher Memorial Prize in Aesthetics.
At the National Humanities Center, Tuna will work on her second book, Imaginative Resistance (under contract with Oxford University Press), the first comprehensive study of why readers and viewers sometimes balk at imagining what fiction asks of them. The project offers a new account of imaginative resistance, combining historical insights from Kant and Hume with contemporary philosophy and psychology. It examines how emotions like disgust and contempt shape our imaginative engagement, why some fictional worlds feel impossible to enter, and what this reveals about the nature of imagination—whether there are standards of success for imagining, what it means to fail at it, and how bias shapes the limits of our imaginative lives.
Selected Publications
- Tuna, Emine Hande. Kantian Art Criticism. New York: Cambridge University Press, Forthcoming.
- Tuna, Emine Hande. “Bolzano’s Aesthetic Cognitivism,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 11, no. 2 (2025): 413–30.
- Tuna, Emine Hande. “Bias Reduction as an Aesthetic Norm,” Philosophical Topics 52, no. 1 (2024): 61–79.
- Tuna, Emine Hande. “Hume and Kant on Imaginative Resistance,” European Journal of Philosophy 32, no. 2 (2024): 342–52.
- Tuna, Emine Hande. “Imaginative Resistance,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2024 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.)