Emine Hande Tuna, 2025–26 | National Humanities Center

Emine Hande Tuna (NHC Fellow, 2025–26)

Project Title

Imaginative Resistance

Philip L. Quinn Fellowship, 2025–26

Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Santa Cruz


Hande Tuna

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

Return to current fellows