Student Executive Committee
Pía Chible (Co-Chair)
Current affiliation: University of Oxford, Law Faculty (doctoral student)
Degrees: Magister Juris from University of Oxford; LLB from Universidad de Chile.
Research interests: Legal and political philosophy, constitutional theory and administrative law.
Research: My research examines the nature of the decisions that are made by government, including questions concerning the nature of the relevant officials, the types of reasons that bear on their decisions, their specific mode of action and the kind of normativity entailed in their decisions. My DPhil thesis is being supervised by Dr. Hasan Dindjer.
Talita Ferrantelli (Co-Chair)
Current affiliation: LSE, Philosophy (doctoral student)
Degrees: MA in Philosophy and MSc Political Theory from University of Amsterdam; BA in Law Fundação Getúlio Vargas
Research interests: Social epistemology, and its interactions with legal and political philosophy.
Research: In my doctoral work, I explore questions that concern the legal and social epistemology of sexual offences. I'm working under the supervision of Lewis Ross, Federico Picinali and Liam Kofi Bright.
Maria Teresa Cotrufo (Communications Director)
Current affiliation: King's College London, Dickson Poon School of Law (doctoral student)
Degrees: MSc in Cognitive and Decision Sciences at University College London; BA in Philosophy at the University of Milano
Research interests: Ethics, moral psychology, mental disability policy and law
Research: I am working on a doctoral thesis supervised by Dr Jillian Craigie and Professor Francesca Happé.
Luiza Tavares da Motta (Secretary and Treasurer)
Current affiliation: Queen Mary University of London, School of Law (doctoral student)
Degrees: LLM in Legal History at the Université de Poitiers (France); Undergraduate Law degree (LLB) at Universidade Federal do Paraná (Brazil).
Research interests: Legal history and legal theory, more specifically in law and literature.
Research: My thesis, supervised by Professor Maksymilian Del Mar and Dr. Tanzil Chowdhury, aims to investigate the rhetorical roles of verb tenses in judicial decisions in the nineteenth century, more specifically in the House of Lords. To do so, this research investigates the emotional experience of time in the nineteenth century, which it does through the lens of gothic literature as a subjective attribution of meaning to reality – for this, the research focuses mainly on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Shasha Sun (Social Media Manager)
Current affiliation: University of Oxford, Law Faculty (doctoral student)
Degrees: M.Phil from University of Oxford; Master of Law (Legal Theory) from China University of Political Science and Law; Bachelor of Law from Shandong University of Science and Technology.
Research interests: Legal and political philosophy.
Research: My research focuses on the justification of political authority, which asks when political authority is legitimate. I explore the conditions under which political authority has valid normative power to change our normative situations and the limitations on exercising that power. By investigating these ideas, I aim to better understand in virtue of which we have obligatory reasons to obey the state. My DPhil thesis is supervised by Dr. Dori Kimel.
Raja Venkata Krishna Dandamudi (Institutional Heads' Manager and Cambridge Institutional Head)
Current affiliation: University of Cambridge, Faculty of Law (doctoral student)
Degrees: LL.M. (Legal Theory) from New York University; B.A., LL.B (Hons) from Jindal Global Law School.
Research interests: Jurisprudence, political philosophy, legal and constitutional history, history of political thought, history of the British Empire
Research: My PhD project is a historical and jurisprudential study of constitutionalism in colonial India (1858). It examines why an unjust political order such as the colonial state in India felt compelled to respect the rule of law and accommodate constitutionalism, and how subjects used this compulsion the colonial state’s part to resist repression, protect their rights and interests, and pursue their political aims. I am supervised by Dr Lars Vinx.
rupal-entity widgetdrupal-entity widgetdrupal-entity widget
Juliet Paiva (Oxford Institutional Head, Politics)
Current affiliation: University of Oxford, Department of Politics and International Relations (MPhil student).
Degrees: BA in Philosophy and Political Science from Columbia University.
Research interests: Contemporary political philosophy, democratic theory and political epistemology.
Research: My work lies in the intersection of democratic theory and political epistemology, and broadly explores the role of truth in democracy. My current research examines cases of deep disagreement in the age of so-called “post-truth” politics—instances where different groups within democracies cannot agree on facts. Drawing on epistemic theories of deliberative democracy, social epistemology, and group cognition, I argue that the popular post-truth explanations misdiagnose the problem of deep disagreement in democracy. Instead, I argue that the epistemic crisis in contemporary democracies arises in its connection to large-scale acts of epistemic injustice, where political groups disregard the epistemic credibility of other groups and thereby dissolve the epistemic ground for deliberation.
Ryan Kendall (Oxford Institutional Head, Philosophy)
Current affiliation: University of Oxford, Philosophy Faculty (BPhil student)
Degrees: Bachelor's degrees in Math and Economics (2008, University of Redlands); PhD in Economics (2013, UC Irvine); Master's degree in Bioethics (2023, NYU).
Research interests: Primary research interests are ethics, political philosophy, epistemology, and metaphysics.
Research: One of my current research projects explores normative issues related to allocating scarce resources through competitions that “pit people against each other.” A central finding of this research is that the distinctive moral defect of such competitions diminishes as the number of participants increases. Another project examines how group agents form epistemic characteristics. A central finding of this research highlights the trade-offs required to ensure group agents accurately represent the epistemic characteristics of the individuals constituting the group.
Jan Henrik Wasserziehr (London School of Economics' Institutional Head, Government)
Current affiliation: LSE, Government (doctoral student).
Degrees: BA in Sociology, Politics & Economics from Zeppelin University, Germany; MSc in Political Theory from LSE.
Research interests: Political Theory, Philosophy and Ethics of Technology & AI, Philosophy of Mind.
Research: My research explores the politico-philosophical implications of contemporary technological change. I argue that both our conceptions of values and our self-conception as rational beings are in flux due to digitization and AI, destabilizing specifically modernist conceptions of freedom, rationality, and the person. Emphasizing the co-emergent nature of human being and technology as well as technology’s impact on human cognition and ability, I call for a subject-centred approach to technology ethics which recognizes the systemic dimensions of technological change and transcends modes of analyses that prioritize individual artifacts and inventions.
Dulyaphab Chaturongkul (King’s College London, Institutional Head)
Current affiliation: King’s College London, Department of Political Economy (doctoral student)
Degrees: MSc in Political Theory from the London School of Economics; BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the University of York.
Research: My research topic is on questions of compromise and agonism in democratic theory, with emphasis on how the recent realist reflection in political theory can help inform the normativity of political concepts. Supervisors: Steven Klein and Robin Douglass.
Armando Romero Muñoz (University of Surrey, Institutional Head)
Current affiliation: University of Surrey, School of Law (doctoral student)
Degrees: LLM by Research in History and Philosophy of Law, University of Edinburgh.
Research interests: Jurisprudence, legal reasoning, moral reasoning, practical reasoning, legal precedent, natural law theory.
