About

I'm a PhD candidate in Philosophy, at the University of Cambridge, supervised by Professor Clare Chambers and Dr Jessie Munton. I am funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (OOC DTP), and by Christ's College, Cambridge, where I hold a Levy Plumb Doctoral Studentship.

Before my PhD, I studied Mathematics and Philosophy at Merton College, Oxford, then completed an MPhil in Philosophy at Darwin College, Cambridge, funded by the Cambridge Trust.

My doctoral research combines philosophy of medicine with social and political philosophy. I’m interested in the standards against which we evaluate psychiatric diagnoses. For my PhD, I develop a novel framework of metaphysical, epistemic, and ethical standards against which psychiatric diagnoses should be assessed. I then apply this framework to critically appraise the gender dysphoria diagnosis. In doing so, I advance a novel account of the metaphysics of gender identity, seeking to understand what it might mean to have a gender identity, over and above just having a gender. More broadly, I’m interested in the metaphysics of social identities – in how our sense of self is negotiated in dialogue with others, using resources made available by our social context. Beyond my PhD, my research interests include medical ethics, political disobedience, and the influence of online culture on the development of contemporary political thought.

Alongside my research, I teach a wide variety of undergraduate Philosophy papers, ranging from Formal Methods (logic, probability and set theory) to Political Philosophy to Metaphysics. I also have experience teaching secondary school students Maths.

In the rest of my time, I love choral singing. I was fortunate to sing with the Choir of Merton College, Oxford, for four years as a choral scholar, and with the Choir of St John's College, Cambridge, for two years as a lay clerk. I continue to enjoy choral singing as a freelance mezzo-soprano. I'm also a long-distance runner, a bagger of Munros and Wainwrights, and a devotee of cold-water swimming at the Cambridge Lido.