Ph.D., University of Notre Dame 2016
Madeline Ahmed Cronin’s primary teaching and research interests are in social and political philosophy, ethics, and feminist theory.
Her work centers on taste—understood as cultivated affective inclination—and its impact on democratic judgment. She is interested in how what we learn to admire, recoil from, or find beautiful shapes moral and political life, and in the reciprocal relationships between culture, politics, and education. To this end she has written on Mary Wollstonecraft’s conception of “true taste” in the European Journal of Political Theory, and on democratized judgment and criticism at Syndicate.
Her current work turns to the art and philosophy of Adrian Piper, exploring how Piper’s artistic practice stages encounters that compel audiences to reflect on their own habits of judgment. In conversation with George Yancy’s account of the “sutured” quality of white tastes, she considers how aesthetic experience might unsettle entrenched perceptual and evaluative norms. Cronin also writes on liberal education and the philosophy of teaching. She has published on Jesuit educational mission and on experiential approaches to philosophical pedagogy, including a chapter in Innovations in Teaching Philosophy: A Toolkit for the 21st-Century Classroom (Bloomsbury, 2026).