Miriam Bankovsky (she/her) is Associate Professor and Head of Department for Politics, Media and Philosophy at La Trobe University, where she teaches into the Bachelor of Politics, Philosophy, and Economics. Her new book, Economics and the Family: A Social and Political History (Cambridge University Press 2025), provides a long critical history of how economists have analysed families in ways that shoulder historical manifestations of the problem of family poverty (producing methodologies that are very different to those employed by philosophers and sociologists who have also studied families). With Professors Rebeca Gomez Betancourt (University of Lyon 2) and Marianne Johnson (Univeristy of Wisconsin, Oshkosh), Miriam has also co-edited the Cambridge Companion to Women in Economics (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) which broadens histories of economics by and about women to include both global North and global South thinking, inclusive of racialised and queer women, with a focus on studies of the social organisation of economic life. Again with Gomez Betancourt and Johnson, Miriam's current project is a critical and interdisciplinary history of how economists have historically analysed birth control, contraception, and abortion.

Prior to this, Miriam’s main expertise was in political and moral philosophy. She completed a French-Australian Cotutelle PhD at UNSW and Paris Ouest Nanterre, with early books on theories of justice and recognition (Perfecting Justice Continuum 2012 hbk, Bloomsbury 2013 pbk; Recognition theory Manchester UP 2012; Penser la reconnaissance CNRS Editions Alpha 2012), and two conversations with Axel Honneth on how critical theories of recognition have been informed by French moral and political philosophy. In 2017, she won the Australasian Association of Philosophy’s Annette Baier Prize in 2017 for a journal article on economic envy. Thanks to an ARC-funded DECRA fellowship (2013-2019), Miriam extended her research into economics. She now works and teaches comfortably across social and political history, history of moral and political thought, history of economics, and economic history.