Nin Kirkham is the Discipline Chair of Philosophy and the Deputy Head of School of Humanities (Community and Outreach). She currently teaches in the areas of critical thinking, continental philosophy, and ethics. Nin also has extensive experience teaching professional ethics and critical thinking into disciplines outside philosophy, including engineering, business and science. Her research focuses on applied ethics especially environmental virtue ethics and the concepts of nature and naturalness as they are employed in debates in environmental ethics, bioethics and technology. She is involved in the promotion and support of philosophy in schools, and philosophy in the community.

Deputy Head (Community and Engagement), School of Humanities

Discipline Chair, Philosophy

Elected Academic Member, UWA Senate

President, UWA Academic Staff Association

Chair of the VC's Student Experience Taskforce 2021–22

Nin is currently working on environmental virtue ethics, in particular the virtue of humility, having just co-written a paper with Chris Letheby on psychedelics and environmental virtues, published in Philosophical Psychology.

She is involved in a project on the use of philosophical communities of inquiry in marginal communities along with Kaz Bland and Stella Tarrant.

Nin has recently published a paper on the ethics of big data and informed consent, with Adam Andreotta and Marco Rizzi.

In teaching, Nin has been involved in the development of the Bachelor of Philosophy, Politics and Economics and the Bachelor of Human Rights with colleagues across the university. 

Nin's teaching interests are broad ranging from ethics to ehilosophy of mind, continental philosophy, logic and critical thinking. She has taught business ethics and professional ethics in various parts of the University and continues to be involved in teaching outside the Discipline of Philosophy, currently being involved in the cross-disciplinary broadening unit SCIE2100: Social Responsibility in Action, the development and co-ordination of the Bachelor of Human Rights and the Bachelor of Philosophy, Politics and Economics.

Normative and applied ethics
Virtue Ethics
Environmental ethics
Bioethics
Ethics of Technology
Heideggerian phenomenology