Euan Allison
Euan is a PhD Philosophy candidate at University College London. He is currently working on political liberalism and relational equality. He also has interests in Kantian ethics and the nature of practical reasons.
Lieke Asma
Lieke Asma is philosopher (PhD.) and psychologist (MSc.). Since April 2018, she is employed at the Munich School of Philosophy, where she was part of a research project on the relationship between implicit motives and human flourishing. In July 2021, she received an individual research grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for the project Implicit bias: What are we missing? She is currently writing a (Dutch) book on implicit bias.
Gillian Brock
Gillian Brock is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. She has published widely on issues in political and social philosophy, ethics, and applied ethics. Her books include Justice for People on the Move: Migration in Challenging Times (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Account (Oxford University Press, 2009), Global Health Ethics: New Challenges (with Solomon Benatar, Cambridge 2020), Cosmopolitanism versus Non-Cosmopolitanism (Oxford 2013), and Debating Brain Drain (with Michael Blake, Oxford 2015). More information about her can be found here.
CONTRIBUTORS
Michelle Ciurria
Michelle Ciurria is a visiting scholar at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She completed her PhD at York University in Toronto and held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of New South Wales and Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of "An Intersectional Feminist Theory of Moral Responsibility."
Joe Cottrell-Boyce
Joe Cottrell-Boyce is a London based Systemic Psychotherapist working in the NHS and in private practice. His published research has focused on social policy, covering youth violence and the criminal justice system. His current area of interest is the application of attachment theory to understand group dynamics.
Hossein Dabbagh
Hossein Dabbagh is an assistant professor of philosophy at Northeastern University London. His published research stretches across three broad fields: moral philosophy, political theology, and practical ethics.
Sonia Cruz Dávila
Sonia is a PhD candidate in Political Theory at the Dickson Poon School of Law and a graduate teaching assistant in the Department of Philosophy at King's College London. Her research focus lies somewhere between constitutional and democratic theory. She is working on the implications of the idea that democracy is intrinsically valuable for our understanding of the doctrine of separation of powers. Her intention is to determine whether a given understanding of the separation of powers can help us establish the lack of democratic legitimacy of certain political actions, like the executive power to veto legislation.
Giulio Fornaroli
Giulio holds a PhD in political theory from UCL Department of Political Science and is a postdoctoral fellow at the Instituto de Investigaciones Filosoficas, UNAM (Mexico City). He is currently involved in a project on the moral foundation of rights and has worked before on liberalism and pluralism. His philosophical sympathies lie between some (very) watered down version of Kantianism and an equally eclectic form of moral perfectionism. His favourite quotation is from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road: “There is no god, and we are his prophets.” See Giulio's Academia page here.
Jasper Doomen
Jasper Doomen is an assistant professor of constitutional law at the Open University of the Netherlands. He has published on various topics in the fields of philosophy and law.
Max Emmett
Max is a PhD researcher in Political Theory at UCL. Their main research is on how civil servants understand their policy making role within democratic states. They are also interested in democratic innovations and how societies and states can empower citizens to make decisions.
Lukas Fuchs
Lukas is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Philosophy & Ethics group at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) in the Netherlands. His 3-year research project “Understanding Responsibility in the Ecosystems of Technical Universities” is part of BoostEuroTeQ, a research project funded by the European Commission (Horizon 2020). He recently received his PhD (thesis: “Political Philosophy, Innovation Policy and Market Shaping”) from the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) at University College London (UCL). More information can be found on his website.
Daniel Guillery
Daniel is currently the Law and Philosophy Fellow in the University of Chicago Law School and in September 2020 will join the politics department at the University of Warwick. His PhD is in philosophy, from University College London. He will soon have taught in philosophy, politics and law departments, and his work is in the kind of political philosophy that lies where these disciplines meet. He is interested in foundational questions about the justification of state use of force, and in particular how these interact with considerations of feasibility. He is currently thinking about state border controls and the justification for the exclusive rights states claim over their territories.
Chris is currently an Associate Lecturer at La Trobe University, where he teaches in Enabling Programs. His research focuses on speech act theory and harmful language. Chris’s current interest is in online speech, and how this changes the things we can do with words.
Chris Cousens
Charles Jansen
Charles completed a PhD in philosophy at University College London in 2020. Since then, I have taken up roles as a lecturer at King’s College London and Birkbeck College, London. His research concerns personal identity, and the nature of material objects in general. At present, he is interested in two questions. First, can two material objects share all of their parts (some philosophers believe they can, citing examples such as persons and their bodies; and statues and lumps of clay: I disagree)? Second, what impact should findings in psychology concerning object cognition (and its development through childhood) have on an account of the nature of material things? Do these findings particularly support any such account?
Aleco Kastanos
Aleco is a philosophy student at Birkbeck, University of London, primarily interested in political, social, and ethical philosophy. He has a background in artificial intelligence and has worked on under-represented languages in natural language processing. Aleco’s current projects focus on ideology, private power, alienation, and technology.
Sam Mace
Sam is a PhD student at the University of Leeds. His research focuses on the state of exception, Arab authoritarianism and the Middle East. He also has a BA and MA in politics from Lancaster University.
Michael Markunas
Michael is an Associate Fellow of the HEA, a lecturer at KCL, and in the final year of his PhD at UCL. His research focuses on knowledge by acquaintance, a concept that intersects the philosophy of perception, mind, language and epistemology. He is also interested in the philosophy of mathematics and ethics, particularly how we can come to know about non-sensible things like numbers and moral properties or values. Before moving to London for his PhD, Michael completed a BA in Philosophy and English at the University of California, Berkeley.
Jessica Masterson
Jessica graduated from the University of Birmingham in December 2023 with a PhD in Philosophy. Her doctoral research focused on the ethics of sadomasochism and the extent of consent's normative power. Her areas of interest are applied ethics, sexual ethics, and feminist philosophy.
Stefano Merlo
Stefano is a Junior Lecturer at the VU Amsterdam's John Stuart Mill College where he teaches economics on the PPE undergraduate program. His research addresses the Economic and Monetary Union from a macroeconomic and philosophical perspective. Stefano is applying republican political theory to the Eurozone to understand which principles of international justice should apply to a currency union. You can find out more on Stefano's own website.
Kenneth Primrose
Kenneth Primrose is a school leader, RE teacher and writer based in Newcastle. He writes on religion, philosophy and education, and has been published by Aeon, The Philosophers Magazine, UNESCO, Theos Think Tank, Big Think, TES, The Wire, Premier Christianity and Qrius among others.
Mia Salminen is a recent graduate of the BSc Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) in Amsterdam. She is currently a MSc Economics student and will soon pursue a second MSc in Political Theory. Her main area of interest concerns questions of socioeconomic justice, predominantly with regard to inequality and poverty.
Mia Salminen
Rowan Mellor
Rowan is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Toronto. In 2021, he completed his PhD at University College London, where he was also a lecturer in political philosophy. Rowan’s work focusses mainly on the ethics of collective action.
Steven Michels
Steven Michels is a professor of political science at Sacred Heart University and the author of Sinclair Lewis and American Democracy (2017) and the editor of Scenes from the American Working Class: This Hard Land (2025), both from Lexington Books.
Eric Scarffe
Eric Scarffe is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Florida International University, with research interests in political philosophy, the philosophy of law, ethics, medical ethics, human rights, and the philosophy of science. Outside of academia, Eric has held positions as a researcher on trade-related issues with UNIFOR (Canada's largest private-sector union) and as a financial editor for Desjardins Capital Markets. For more information, please visit his website at www.ericscarffe.com.
Jesse Spafford
Jesse Spafford is a lecturer at the Victoria University of Wellington. His research is focused on ethics and political philosophy, with particular attention paid to debates between libertarians, socialists, and anarchists over the moral status of the market and the state. He is the author of the book Social Anarchism and the Rejection of Moral Tyranny (open access with Cambridge University Press, 2023). You can find out more about his work here.
Lukas Schmid
Lukas is a PhD researcher in Political Theory at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. His doctoral work is situated in the political theory of immigration and assesses the permissibility of various immigration enforcement practices, such as deportation and externalization. He is also interested in relational conceptions of egalitarianism and the prospects for globalizing them, as well as various aspects of the methodology of political theorizing, such as the moralism/realism debate and conceptual engineering and analysis, and further topics in applied ethics, such as just war theory and decisionmaking under risk.
Yana Stoykova
Yana is an MA Legal and Political Theory student at University College London. Her research interests lie at the intersections of feminist theory, political and legal philosophy and aesthetics. She is currently researching the misogynistic and heteronormative assumptions underlying the institution of sexual consent.
Jonathan Spiegler
Jonathan is a PhD candidate in political science at Michigan State University specializing in political philosophy and public policy. His dissertation research is on the system of French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville’s thought and he is working to explain the problems Tocqueville considers inherent to democratic regimes, and some of the non-political strategies he suggests for moderating those problems. Jonathan teaches classes on the history of political philosophy, American political thought, public policy, and public administration. Jonathan holds a BA in political science and economics from Kenyon College, and a MPP in social policy from the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota.
David Thorstad
David Thorstad is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Philosophy at the Global Priorities Institute, Oxford, and Junior Research Fellow at Kellogg College. Beginning Fall 2023, Thorstad will be Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University
Nikhil Venkatesh
Nikhil teaches and researches philosophy at the London School of Economics, having recently submitted his PhD thesis at University College London.
His research focuses primarily on utilitarianism and socialism, with interests in effective altruism, population ethics, Marxism, the ethics of data, the philosophy of race and gender, and the nature of normativity, morality and politics.
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Nikhil is a co-editor of What To Do About Now.
Mia Salminen
Mia Salminen is a recent graduate of the BSc Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) in Amsterdam. She is currently a MSc Economics student and will soon pursue a second MSc in Political Theory. Her main area of interest concerns questions of socioeconomic justice, predominantly with regard to inequality and poverty.
Paschal Ukpaka
Paschal Ukpaka is a postgraduate student in philosophy at the University of Johannesburg. He is also a researcher at the UJ Metaverse Research Unit. The University of Johannesburg funded this research on AI creativity under the GES scholarship scheme. Paschal’s current work is on copyright infringement and authorship of large language models.
Katherine Valde
Katherine Valde is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wofford College, with research interests in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of biology (including the relationship between science and values, and the concept of neutrality). She earned her PhD in Philosophy at Boston University in 2019 and her BA from Lawrence University in 2012, where she majored in Biology and Philosophy and minored in Psychology. For more information, please visit her website https://katherinevalde.com/
![6e483ac4-2e03-43fa-b169-a17541ff70c3[47]_edited.jpg](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/9c1df8_5047fdfdb2e54f7d918dafd1b609fef0~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_200,h_217,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/6e483ac4-2e03-43fa-b169-a17541ff70c3%5B47%5D_edited.jpg)
Tessa Vanbrabant
Tessa Vanbrabant graduated in Philosophy at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) and is currently finishing her MSC in Equality Studies at the University College Dublin (Ireland). Her main philosophical and egalitarian interests revolve around the concept ‘emancipation’ in the areas of feminist, political and practical philosophy, critical theory, phenomenology and poststructuralism
Nikhil Venkatesh
Nikhil teaches and researches philosophy at the London School of Economics, having recently submitted his PhD thesis at University College London.
His research focuses primarily on utilitarianism and socialism, with interests in effective altruism, population ethics, Marxism, the ethics of data, the philosophy of race and gender, and the nature of normativity, morality and politics.
​
Nikhil is a co-editor of What To Do About Now.
Mia Salminen
Mia Salminen is a recent graduate of the BSc Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) in Amsterdam. She is currently a MSc Economics student and will soon pursue a second MSc in Political Theory. Her main area of interest concerns questions of socioeconomic justice, predominantly with regard to inequality and poverty.
Nikhil Venkatesh
Nikhil teaches and researches philosophy at the London School of Economics, having recently submitted his PhD thesis at University College London.
His research focuses primarily on utilitarianism and socialism, with interests in effective altruism, population ethics, Marxism, the ethics of data, the philosophy of race and gender, and the nature of normativity, morality and politics.
​
Nikhil is a co-editor of What To Do About Now.
John Woolf
Dr John Woolf is a nineteenth-century specialist who read History at Cambridge and Goldsmiths. He has researched and produced history documentaries for the BBC, co-
authored a number of Audible Originals, including ‘The Halifax Slasher’, ‘Stephen Fry’s Victorian Secrets’ and ‘Stephen Fry’s Edwardian Secret’, and is the author of ‘The Wonders’.
Jenny Strandberg
Jenny Strandberg is a Teaching Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut, United States. Her scholarship focuses on Plato’s political philosophy and its relevance to contemporary issues. She earned her PhD in Philosophy from Stony Brook University, New York, in 2020 and a BS in Journalism and Science from Göteborgs universitet in Sweden. She also holds a graduate certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies from Stony Brook and was a fellow at the American Association of University Women from 2018 to 2019.