Prof. Dr. Gily Coene

Gily Coene is Director of Rhea and co-founder and VUB-program-director of the Interuniversity Master in Gender and Diversity. She obtained her PhD in Moral Sciences at Ghent University in 2004 and thereafter obtained a post-doctoral Marie Curie fellowship at the University of Warwick. Since 2006, she was appointed at the Chair of Humanist Studies at the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences of VUB. She is currently also part-time affiliated with the Department of Political Sciences. Her teaching assignments include Introduction to Feminist Thought, Introduction to Women and Gender Studies, Philosophy and Ethics of Sex, Introduction to the Moral Sciences and Humanist Studies. Next to Rhea, she is affiliated with the Centre of Ethics and Humanism at the VUB.  Her research is mainly located at the intersections of descriptive and normative ethics, feminist theory and gender studies and covers a wide range of issues related to gender, cultural diversity and ethnicity (e.g. the headscarf debate, ’honour’ related violence, harmful practices)  globalization, irregular migration and human rights , secularism, humanism and spirituality, sexual and reproductive rights and development.