Amia Srinivasan


Amia Srinivasan is a philosopher and academic, specialising in political philosophy, epistemology and metaphilosophy. Since January 2020, she has been Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford.

Early life and education

Srinivasan was born in Bahrain to Indian parents and later lived in New York. She studied for an undergraduate degree in Philosophy at Yale University. This was followed by postgraduate Bachelor of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy degrees as a Rhodes Scholar at Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford. She completed her DPhil in 2014 with a thesis tiled The Fragile Estate: Essays on Luminosity, Normativity and Metaphilosophy.

Academic career

In 2009 she was elected as a Prize Fellow at All Souls College. In 2015 she was appointed as a lecturer in Philosophy at UCL. In 2018 she was appointed as a tutorial Fellow in Philosophy at St John's College. In 2016 she was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for the project 'At the Depths of Believing'. She has held visiting fellowships at UCLA, Yale, and NYU. In 2019, she was announced as the next Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford: she took up the appointment on 1 January 2020.
She is an associate editor of the philosophy journal Mind and a contributing editor of the London Review of Books.

Selected publications

Journal articles

2013. Are we Luminous? Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 90: 294 – 319.
2015. The Archimedean Urge. Philosophical Perspectives 29: 325-362.
2015. Normativity without Cartesian Privilege. Philosophical Issues 25: 273-299.
2016. Philosophy and Ideology. Theoria 31: 371-380.
2018. The Aptness of Anger. Journal of Political Philosophy 26: 123-144.
2018. The Ineffable and the Ethical. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 96: 215-223.
2018. How to do things with philosophy. European Journal of Philosophy 26: 1410-1416.
2020. "He, She, One, They, Ho, Hus, Hum, Ita", London Review of Books, vol. 42, no. 13, pp. 34–39. Prof. Srinivasan writes : "People use non-standard pronouns, or use pronouns in non-standard ways, for various reasons: to accord with their sense of themselves, to make their passage through the world less painful, to prefigure and hasten the arrival of a world in which divisions of sex no longer matter. So too we can choose to respect people's pronouns for many reasons."