About

Nils in sunglasses smiling over a beer in front of the Alps.
Photo by Jacob Brookman.

I am a Humboldt fellow at Universität Hamburg, where I am writing a monograph under contract with Oxford University Press. Following my fellowship, I will begin as associate lecturer at Uppsala Universitet. Before this, I was an aesthetics teaching postdoc and instructor at the University of Auburn, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow directing the Art & Ethics project at the University of Southampton, and a postdoctoral research fellow at the Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas at UNAM. I completed my PhD at the University of Michigan in 2016.

I grew up both in the South of England and in Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany. (My move to Hamburg therefore represents a sort of homecoming, as documented in the Hamburger Abendblatt’s magazine Himmel&Elbe).

Later, I studied philosophy at the University of Sheffield and returned there to complete an MA following a year teaching English in Valencia, Spain. I am the first in my family to attend university.

Two shih-tzu mixes look cutely out of a car window.

I am married to Fown (pronunciation: ‘phone’) with whom I have three children: Katharina, Kaspar, and Axel. We have two dogs named Beverly and Matilda.

As for pronouncing my name, it rhymes with ‘pills, tennis, beer’, which sounds like a fun time. I go by ‘Nils’.

Email: nstear@umich.edu

CV: Click here.