Job market Candidates 2024 - Subfield: Political Theory

My doctoral research concerns how labour should be organised. The COVID-19 pandemic drastically transformed work as we knew it; in its wake has emerged new working practices, a socially salient group of ‘key’ workers, and greater recognition of the essential nature of domestic labour. In my dissertation, I explore normative questions regarding the organisation of work that are loosely inspired by these recent developments. In addition, I have research interests in methodological debates within political theory and the nature of sexual consent.

College: Nuffield College

Thesis Title: Divisions of Labour: essays on work

Supervisors: Rachel Fraser & Sophie Smith

Key Publications:

2024. 'Moderate Realist Ideology Critique’. In the European Journal of Philosophy.

2023. Review of Helen Hester’s & Nick Srnicek’s After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time. In the Journal of Applied Philosophy.

My work is concerned with the politics of emotions and mental health, post-conflict reconciliation and theories of immanent critique. I draw on a wide range of sources in my writings, including critical theory and continental political philosophy, but also analytic philosophy, sociological and psychological theory, and cognitive science, among other things. My doctoral dissertation, The Miserable is Political: A Critical Theory of Anger and Depression, explores how our emotions can help us understand and resist injustice and oppression, and links debates about immanent critique to work in feminist philosophy of emotions. I teach undergraduate tutorials in political theory and critical theory at various Oxford colleges, and graduate seminars in ethics and public policy at the Blavatnik School of Government.

College: Corpus Christi College

Thesis title: The Miserable is Political: A Critical Theory of Anger and Depression 

Supervisor: Professor Lois McNay

Key publications:

2024. ‘The Bellwether of Oppression: Anger, Critique, and Resistance’. Hypatia. Online first. 7.

2022. ‘Philosophy from the Texture of Everyday Life: The Critical-Analytic Methods of Foucault and J. L. Austin’. Foucault Studies 33: 48-66.

2022. ‘Anger and Apology, Recognition and Reconciliation: Managing Emotions in the Wake of Injustice’. Global Studies Quarterly 2(2): ksac023.

2022. ‘Settling Accounts at the End of History: A Nonideal Approach to State Apologies’. Political Theory 50(5): 700-722.

2021. ‘These are not Just Words: A Cross-National Comparative Study of the Content of Political Apologies’. International Review of Social Psychology 34(1): 15, 1-13. Available open access. (w/ M. Zoodsma, J. Shaafsma, T. Sagherian-Dickey).

My research examines conservative and religious political thought (especially in the Christian and Islamic traditions) and its intersection with the problems of pluralism and tolerance. My thesis explores the new ‘postliberal’ movement and its critique of liberal neutrality as a mask for the imposition of a controversial doctrine of autonomy and self-expression on more traditionally-minded citizens. Through analysis of the normative implications of religious and philosophical pluralism and of the real-world consequences of liberalism ‘as a way of life’, I argue that an attractive and sustainable middle-ground position of pluralistic and constrained perfectionism can repair the damage done by liberalism’s specious appeal to neutrality without resorting to authoritarian alternatives that give up on the ideals of mutual tolerance and respect.

College: Green Templeton College

Thesis title: Postliberalism and its Discontents: Responding to the Liberal Regime’s New Right-Wing Critics

Supervisor: Dr Paul Billingham

Key Publications:

“Wake Up or Go Woke? A Review of Eric Kaufmann’s ‘The Third Awokening’.” Forthcoming (2024). Academic Questions Winter 2024. 

“Islam, Religious Freedom, and the Opening of the Conservative Mind”. Forthcoming (2024). Renovatio Fall 2024.

“Islamic Traditionalists: ‘Against the Modern World’?”. 2023. Muslim World 113 (3): 333–54.