Meet the Team

Rachael is a philosopher of mind, action and ethics and works especially on the philosophy of G. E. M. Anscombe. With Clare she co-directs the In Parenthesis Project. More…

Clare is a philosopher of perception, aesthetics and mind. With Rachael she co-directs the In Parenthesis Project. More…

Rachel is a project manager working in the arts and cultural sector. She joined our team in 2019 to oversee the production of our public programme and partnership work.

Sally is a graphic and web designer with a passion for projects that drive positive social change. Her work includes the design and delivery of participatory projects, brand strategy and visual identity, artist-led collaborations and all kinds of work across print and web. She collaborates with clients to shape meaningful projects that make a difference.

Sally has worked with Women In Parenthesis to produce design and illustration for Philosophy by Postcard, Notes from a Biscuit Tin and Mapping the Quartet.

Sam Cooper has a BA and MA from University of York. He is working on, among other things, Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, Aquinas and Wittgenstein. He has written a number of pieces for the website, which you can find here.

Amber is a PhD student at Durham working (with Clare MacCumhaill) on Environmental philosophy, specifically, on Mary Midgley’s use of the concept ‘Gaia’. She is also interested in meta-philosophy, and is keen to explore creative ways of practicing philosophy which challenge problematic hegemonic practices. She has been working with the In Parenthesis project since 2017.

Read more here.

Annie worked as an intern on In Parenthesis 2016-17 and designed our reading programme. Her PhD research investigates women’s representation in philosophy – with a particular emphasis on reasons for women’s attrition from the discipline…

Ellie completed a BA and MA at Durham and started working with the In Parenthesis team at the beginning of 2017. Ellie has a specific interest in Mary Midgley on whom is writing her PhD.

Find out more about Ellie’s research here.

Hazel is an aspiring theorist and writer from South Wales. Having studied her BA at the University of Gloucestershire and MPhil at Cardiff university she has a broad range of philosophical interests straddling the analytic-continental divide. She agrees with Midgley that philosophy is a necessary and integral part of life and is currently working on a piece ‘Who is philosophy for?’ which seeks to argue that philosophy is for everybody.

You can read her introduction to Midgley’s Rings and Books here.

Nav is a Durham Social Sciences undergraduate, drawn to the Quartet after reading Murdoch’s “The Idea of Perfection”. He joined the programme to explore the context in which these four philosophers fundamentally changed the landscape of modern philosophy, and what this teaches us about how we ought to teach and learn. He is also interested in the application of philosophical propositions to their logical ends in fields like economics and anthropology.

Jazmine was intern on the project (2017-18). She convened the Durham University reading group and worked with PhilSoc. more…

Amia’s work with Women in Parenthesis hopes to connect A-Level students with the wider depth of philosophy, helping to centralise the female voice in their introductions to Philosophy and bring recognition to those influential philosophers like Midgley, Foot, Anscombe, and Murdoch who, in the face of Ayer and logical positivism, brought metaphysics “back to life.” She presented her paper at the Westminster Philosophical Horizons conference answering, ‘Is there a universal right to cross borders and on what basis is citizenship conferred or denied?’ At a seminar entitled, The Scientific View on the Humanities, she engaged with academics from Stanford Online School about denouncing the myth that sciences and the humanities offer competing visions for the human being. She also responded to a paper at the Young Philosophers’ Conference, rebuking William James’ claim that the history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a clash of human temperaments. You can read her piece aimed at other A-Level students to inspire them to read and engage with Midgley’s papers here.

Will works on the philosophy of action and perception, and his thesis is about the role that habits play in the explanation of action. In 2019 he worked for a month on a primarily historical project for Women in Parenthesis, focussing on the background condition they have identified in the flourishing of the four of them: the fact that a lot of men at Oxford fought in the war, or were seconded by the intelligence services. He will be looking at what a number of these philosophers did during the war, and charting how it affected the philosophical output and culture of Oxford throughout the wartime period.

Mitch is currently completing the M. St. in English (1900-Present strand) at Hertford College, Oxford University. Before this, they were an undergraduate in English at The University of Manchester and at Freie Universität, Berlin. They are interested in the possibilities of genetic criticism, textual theory, and book-historical approaches as they relate to the work of queer and/or women writers of the C20th, with particular emphasis on the poetry notebooks of Iris Murdoch, as well as her wider ‘literary’-philosophical milieu.

Amber is in the third year of her English and Philosophy BA. She was drawn to the quartet by Anscombe’s ‘Intentionality of sensation’ and stayed for Midgely’s Gaia and Murdoch’s novels! She is interested in the intersection between the philosophy of action and the philosophy of Psychiatry.

Hannah is Reader in Philosophy at St. Mary’s University. Her work on Iris Murdoch’s philosophy explores Murdoch’s understanding of human beings as ‘imaginative fantasising animals’, using the work of Michèle le Doeuff. She has a published a monograph (Iris Murdoch and the Art of Imagining, Continuum 2008).

Maria is lecturer in philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire. She is the author of ‘Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit: meaning and astonishment’ and the editor of the collection ‘Cora Diamond on Ethics’ (forthcoming). Her current research project brings together Heidegger and Arendt on the significance of earthly nature for humans, and studies the concepts of nature, earth, and technology.

Mara is interested in the relation between reason and emotions, in particular regarding human-animal-relations. She agrees with Mary Midgley that “sensitivity requires rationality to complete it, and vice versa”. Drawing on her background in political philosophy and philosophical pragmatism, she has just published Humans and other Animals, a book on becoming passionate (about) animals (in German, the English version will follow suit soon). Mara is also pursuing a literary career, mostly in poetry, and has come up with a couple of creative “animal-assisted philosophy” interventions that allow her to combine all of her interests – and share them with others.

maradariacojocaru.weebly.com

Jessy’s current scholarly work is focused on defending Neo-Aristotelian natural normativity from its detractors. He has published articles on Philippa Foot and Iris Murdoch

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David is interested in the history of gender performance in modern British philosophy. His research details the adoption of elite modes of gender expression by first-generation female post-graduate students in the Moral Sciences Faculty at Cambridge. He contributes to Women (in Parenthesis) perspectives on the nature of doing philosophy with men  after 1922, especially as it concerns the intellectual lives of women of talent like the American logician Alice Ambrose (1906-2001).

Greg McElwain is Associate Professor and Chair of Philosophy and Religious Studies at The College of Idaho, USA. His research focuses on the thought of Mary Midgley and the intersection of animal and environmental ethics. He is author of Mary Midgley: An Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2019) and collaborated with Midgley during the final years of her life.

Carol is interested in the contemporary relevance of Iris Murdoch’s fictional writing about women’s experience and her ideas about classification. Carol’s practice is rooted in the aesthetic context of conceptual writing, and she is the author of ‘Cartography for Girls, an A-Z of Orientations identified within the Novels of Iris Murdoch’. She uses Instagram as a platform to share and explore these representations of female agency, most recently in relation to the lockdowns.

Richard works on Aesthetics, with specialism in the philosophy of Adorno. He designed the Resources for Teachers on this website.

Peter West works primarily in the history of philosophy and is especially interested in recovering the work of women philosophers. He is particularly interested in the metaphysics and epistemology of Margaret Cavendish and the popular philosophical writings of Susan Stebbing. Read more…

Andrew is archivist at Durham University. He has catalogued the material gifted by Mary Midgley and her family and is on hand to discuss all things Midgley!

Jess works at the Collegium Institute and is also the founder of a new project, Commonplace Living. She studied Art History and English during her undergraduate years and received her MA in Catholic Studies from the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Her current research interests surround an exploration of enclosed gardens, particularly as the trope has developed and changed throughout the history of art, it’s use in nineteenth and twentieth century painting and it’s relation to the depiction of women. She is coordinating the partnership between #philosophybypostcard and the Collegium Institute, and developing a new arts initiative for the Collegium Institute.