Our staff

Luca Barlassina

Luca is interested in how the mind works. He maintains that a good way to discover how it does is by combining philosophy with cognitive science. His research focuses on affective states - things like emotion, pain, and pleasure - but he also spends quite a lot of time thinking about moral and social cognition, mental disorder, and the foundations of cognitive science.

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Chris Bennett stood outside HRI building

Christopher Bennett

Chris is the Head of the Department of Philosophy. His main interests in philosophy are in moral, political and legal philosophy. He is interested in various questions in criminal law and criminal justice policy, as well as dabbling in philosophy of the emotions, moral psychology and history of philosophy.

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Megan Blomfield

Megan is primarily interested in political philosophy. Her main focus is global justice and the environment, particularly the ethical problem of climate change. Megan argues that by considering what the world would look like if natural resources were shared fairly, we can better understand the problem of climate change and some of the ethical challenges that it raises.

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Ryan Byerly

Ryan’s main areas of research are in philosophy of religion, epistemology and virtue ethics. In philosophy of religion, he focuses on questions about free will; In virtue theory, Ryan thinks about what virtues such as others-centeredness or intellectual benevolence are like, and he partners with psychologists to study how these traits affect people’s lives.

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Niall Connolly

Niall's research covers metaphysics, the philosophy of language, philosophical logic, metaethics, aesthetics and the philosophy of religion. He is particularly interested in questions about non-existent objects (for instance, can we think and talk about Santa Claus only if there is such a thing as Santa Claus?), as well as the nature of time, truth, and fiction.

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Paul Faulkner

Paul is interested in epistemology, particularly testimony, philosophical issues about trust, and the philosophy of science. He is primarily interested in the epistemology of testimony, which is to say in producing a theory about how knowledge is communicated.

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Joshua Forstenzer

Josh's main interests are in political and social philosophy, American pragmatism, and philosophy of education. He teaches modules entitled ‘Philosophy of Education’, ‘Life Worth Living’, and ‘Knowledge, Justification and Doubt’ and his teaching has been recognised with multiple teaching awards.

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Dominic Gregory

Dominic’s primary interests are in philosophical logic, aesthetics, philosophy of wind, and metaphysics. A lot of his research has focused on the philosophical study of various forms of images, like pictures and mental imagery, and their connections to related aspects of the mind, such as memory and the imagination.

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Max Khan Haywood

Max mainly works in metaethics, normative ethics and moral psychology, but he also has interests in rationality, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind, and in David Hume, Adam Smith and the American Pragmatists.

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Angie Hobbs

Angie’s interests are primarily in Ethics and in Ancient Greek Philosophy. She is Professor for the Public Understanding of Philosophy. Topics she particularly focuses on are: the ethics of flourishing and virtue ethics; courage, heroism and fame; concepts of 'manliness'; war and peace; love and desire; mental health and illness; relations between philosophy and literature; and relations between ethics and aesthetics.

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Jules Holroyd

Jules' research interests are in ethics, moral psychology and feminist philosophy, and in particular questions to do with responsibility and blame. She focuses on questions concerning the ways in which individuals and institutions are implicated in - and complicit in - injustices, including implicit gender and racial biases.

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Rosanna Keefe

Rosanna’s main philosophical interests lie within the philosophy of logic, philosophy of language and metaphysics. Her book, 'Theories of Vagueness', investigates the vagueness of language. Vagueness is a very widespread feature of all natural languages - it yields paradoxes and philosophical challenges for understanding how language works, and much of Rosanna’s work grapples with these stubborn issues.

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Stephen Laurence

Steve’s main research interests are in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and cognitive science. He is interested in philosophical questions about minds such as: What kinds of minds do animals have, and how do minds differ across the animal kingdom? Could we ever build a robot that has a real mind? What is the mind of a newborn baby like?

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Jimmy Lenman

Jimmy is primarily interested in ethics, especially meta-ethics and moral psychology. He is very interested, among many other things, in trying to make sense of what we might mean when we say we ought to do stuff. He likes to read about and teach the history of philosophy, especially ancient Greek, ancient Chinese and 18th century European Philosophy.

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Eric Olson

Eric's research is primarily in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. Topics of particular interest include personal identity, material objects, time, and death. He is perhaps best known for his defence of the view known as ‘animalism’, which says that we are animals.

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Komarine Romdenh-Romluc

Komarine is interested in using ideas from the phenomenological tradition to address issues in contemporary philosophy of mind. Her research focuses on the body, examining the ways that being embodied enters into our mental capacities in a number of surprising ways. She is interested in the nature of habit, as well as what it is to pay attention to something, which she is exploring this through considering experiences of mindfulness.

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Yonatan Shemmer

Yonatan’s main interests are the philosophy of action, the philosophy of practical reason and the contribution of these two fields to ethics and to the theory of normativity in general. He has recently worked on 'Disagreement'. People usually understand by ‘disagreement’ the holding of incompatible beliefs. However, he and his friend Graham Priestley have suggested a theory according to which disagreement extends into people's intentions, plans and even in their tastes.

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Minna Shkul

Minna’s interests range from the social history of early Christianity to questions of social equality and diversity, concerning in particular feminism, gender and sexuality. She teaches modules on religion and social sciences, as well as gender, sexuality and religion, and launched Sheffield’s unique LGBT* studies module in 2015. Minna is the Admissions Tutor for our BA Philosophy, Region and Ethics degree.

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Minna Shkul

Minna’s interests range from the social history of early Christianity to questions of social equality and diversity, concerning in particular feminism, gender and sexuality. She teaches modules on religion and social sciences, as well as gender, sexuality and religion, and launched Sheffield’s unique LGBT* studies module in 2015. Minna is the Admissions Tutor for our BA Philosophy, Region and Ethics degree.

Read Minna's full profile