Selected Speaker Biographies (Where Provided)

Selected Speaker Biographies (where provided)

Please note speakers are arranged A-Z by first name.

Aaron Brooks grew up in Lynchburg, Virginia. He received his B.S. in mathematics from Liberty University, an M.Div. from Duke University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy from Florida State University. His primary area of research is in value theory and its relation to how we should live. In particular, he specializes on life’s meaning. He has been published in Unisinos Journal of Philosophy. He is currently an Instructor of Philosophy at Durham Technical Community College.

Angel On Ki TING received her PhD from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2013 and is currently a lecturer in philosophy at School of Continuing Education of Hong Kong Baptist University. She teaches applied ethics and introduction to philosophy. Her research interests include bioethics, meaning in/of life, moral psychology, ethics, comparative philosophy, early Confucianism and Zhuangzi.

Anton Heinrich Rennesland obtained his MA and BA Philosophy degrees from the University of Santo Tomas, Manila, Philippines, where he is currently a faculty member of the Department of Philosophy. He published several journal articles and has forthcoming book chapters on his fields of interest: Friedrich Nietzsche, Peter Sloterdijk, Comparative Philosophy, and the Anthropocene.

Aribiah David Attoe is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Centre for Leadership ethics in Africa, University of Fort Hare, South Africa. He is a recipient of the Global Excellence Stature scholarship from the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He also holds a Doctoral Degree from the University of Johannesburg, a Master’s degree in philosophy of mind and a Bachelor’s degree (Hons.) from the University of Calabar, Nigeria. He is also a member of the prestigious Conversational School of Philosophy. His major research areas of interest span across: African Philosophy, Neurophilosophy, Metaphysics and Ethics, and he has given various talks on areas related to his research areas at different international forums and conferences.

Benjamin Murphy was born in England in 1972 and studied philosophy and theology at Oxford, where his doctorate was supervised by Richard Swinburne. In 2000, he moved to Latin America and he is now settled in the Republic of Panama with his wife Maria del Rocío. He teaches at Florida State University’s branch campus. The main goal of his research is to cast light on the proper role of logic within religious thinking, taking into account recent work on logical pluralism.

Bernice Brijan MA is a Ph.D. student based at Tilburg University and at the University of York. During her graduate studies in theology and religion she focused mainly on Early Judaism and the Dead Sea Scrolls as well as on spiritual care. This background has profoundly shaped her interest in the study of ritual and transformative experiences with regard to loss and recovery. Her current research in the fields of philosophy of religion and philosophy of psychiatry is aimed at developing the notion of personal recovery in the context of psychiatric vulnerability with the help of the concept of existential feeling.

Bryony Pierce completed her PhD at the University of Bristol. Her doctoral thesis was on ‘The Role of Consciousness in Action’ and she has published papers on consciousness, philosophy of action, rationality, artificial intelligence and experimental philosophy. She is a former member of the European Science Foundation CNCC “CONTACT” research group, was an Honorary Research Associate at the University of Bristol until April 2018, and is a Founder Member of Experimental Philosophy Group UK, as well as being actively engaged in community philosophy.

Carien Smith is a writer and academic, currently a resident writing fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study in South Africa. In her creative work she mainly works in the genres of short fiction and theatre. In academic work her research focus is in philosophy and literature, specifically on climate change ethics, the apocalypse, absurdity, and value theory.

Charles Nkem Okolie was born on 5th October 1973 and hails from Mgbowo in Enugu State, Nigeria. He holds a B.Sc (Ed) in Philosophy- 1997, M.A -2002, LLB-2005, and Ph.D- 2008 in Philosophy. Currently he is an Associate Professor of Philosophy in Alex Ekwueme Federal University Ndufu Alike Ebonyi State Nigeria. He has published widely in reputable journals and his research interest is on Political Philosophy, Law and recently on Ethics and meaning in life. He is married to Maureen and the marriage is blessed with 3 Children, Charles, Valentine and Mcanthony.

Dr. Charles Repp is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Longwood University. He teaches and writes about meaning in life, applied ethics, ancient philosophy, and the philosophy of literature. He is past President of the Virginia Philosophical Association.

Christophe du Ray is a final-year PhD candidate at King’s College London. His main research interests lie in philosophy of religion, metaphysics and philosophy of science. He has been working on what he calls an 'evolutionary sceptical challenge to scientific realism' over the course of his time at King's.

Drew Chastain teaches philosophy as a Visiting Professor at Loyola University New Orleans and has published a number of articles on spirituality and meaning in life. His work explores what it means to be spiritual but not religious and also how to better understand the subjective, experiential aspect of meaning in life.

Ema Sullivan-Bissett is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham. Her research interests lie primarily in the philosophy of mind and psychology, specifically belief and its connection to truth, self-deception, and delusion, as well as biological approaches to what are characteristically thought to be normative questions in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and ethics. She is also interested in anti-natalism, pro-mortalism, and the connection between the two.

Eri Mountbatten-O’Malley is a Graduate Teaching Assistant and final year PhD at Edge Hill University. Eri’s research interests are at the cross-roads between epistemology and ethics. In particular he is interested in conceptions of human nature, language, normativity, philosophy of psychology and notions of the common good. His PhD research is a conceptual analysis of human flourishing. He has spoken internationally on the relationship between education and wonder, as well as the problems related to reductionist accounts of human flourishing. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and an executive committee member of the British Postgraduate Philosophical Association (BPPA).

Fionn O’Donovan. I was born and educated in Southampton, and then moved to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Brasenose College, Oxford in 2012. In Oxford, I developed my interest in ethics and the meaning of life, and went on to complete a Masters in Philosophy at the University of Reading before moving back to Southampton to start a PhD on Aristotelian meta-ethical naturalism. I am primarily a moral philosopher, but I am also interested in epistemology, political philosophy, and the history of philosophy (especially Wittgenstein and Indian Buddhist philosophy). You can find out more on my personal website.

Francesca Brencio is an Assistant Professor and Researcher in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Seville (Spain), Convener and Instructor at the Pheno-Lab, A Theoretical Laboratory on Philosophy and Mental Health, hosted by the Department of Psychosomatic Medicine at the University Hospital in Freiburg (Germany) and member of The Phenomenology and Mental Health Network at The Collaborating Centre for Values-Based Practice in Health and Social Care, Catherine’s College, University of Oxford (UK).

Heidi Cobham is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Sussex. Her research focuses on the phenomenology of being in love. Heidi previously studied BA and MA Philosophy at Heythrop College, University of London.

Iddo Landau is a professor of philosophy at the University of Haifa, Israel. He is author of Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World (Oxford University Press, 2017) and editor of The Oxford Handbook of Meaning in Life (forthcoming).

Jag Williams is a MSc philosophy student at the University of Edinburgh with interests in the intersections of the philosophies of cognition, language, and mind and how these domains of philosophy describe various aspects of human embodiment, rationality, and religiosity. In particular, his research focuses on exploring the connection between embodiment and rationality through the theoretical lenses of the Phenomenological and American Pragmatist traditions in order to better articulate and develop the ways embodied and social practices play a fundamental role in shaping our experience as embodied, social, and rational creatures.

Jairus Diesta Espiritu is Instructor at the Department of Philosophy, University of the Philippines, Diliman. He recently finished his MA Philosophy from the same institution. His master’s thesis is entitled “Antiphilosophical Investigations: Badiou’s notion of Antiphilosophy and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.” Arguing against the reading of the French philosopher Alain Badiou, he maintained in his thesis that Wittgenstein’s posthumous Philosophical Investigations is antiphilosophical much like the earlier Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

Jin Xin is a doctoral candidate at Nanjing University (China), exchange student at Wilfrid Laurier University (Canada) in 2017, visiting scholar at University of Texas at Austin in 2018. He is focusing on the philosophy of mind, especially on contemporary free will problem. His dissertation is trying to deal with the luck objection to libertarianism.

Jordi Fairhurst is a PhD candidate at the University of the Balearic Islands with a FPU grant from the Ministerio de Educacion, Cultura y Deporte del Gobierno de España (MINECO). His current project focuses on Wittgenstein's ethics, although his research interests also include various topics in metaethics and philosophy of language (and their intersection).

Joshua Chang, Degrees: M.Div., Yale University, Connecticut; B.A., Classical Studies and Philosophy, Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania. Research Interests: Asian Philosophy, Ethics, Meaning of Life, Philosophy of Religion, Political Philosophy.

Joshua Lewis Thomas is a postdoctoral researcher. He studied at the University of Sheffield between 2009 and 2018, where he received a BA, MA, and PhD all in philosophy. His doctoral thesis was entitled ‘Mortality and Meaningfulness’ and aimed to explore the relationship between death and the meaning of human life. To date, he has published 4 papers on this topic. Presently, he is working as a research associate on the AHRC Heritage in War project, jointly based at The Open University, UK, and the Stockholm Centre for the Ethics of War and Peace, Sweden.

Dr. Kalpita Bhar Paul, is an assistant professor of Philosophy, Krea University. She has a PhD. in Environmental Philosophy from Manipal University. Her research primarily captures how philosophical engagements through concepts and categories could fundamentally help us to understand human--nature relationships better. Currently, she is completing her monograph, which will present an engaged philosophical analysis of the Sundarbans crisis, to be published by Cambridge University Press. She, by collaborating with a National award-winning documentary filmmaker--Sourav Sarangi, is also making a documentary on the Indian Sundarbans.

Dr. Kiki Berk is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Southern New Hampshire University. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the VU University Amsterdam in 2010. Her current research interests include value theory (especially happiness), analytic existentialism (especially the meaning of life), and the philosophy of death.

Lisa Bortolotti is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham. She works in the philosophy of the cognitive sciences, with special focus on belief, rationality, and mental health, and on the epistemic and ethical issues raised by medicine. Her latest books are the edited volume Delusions in Context (Palgrave 2018) and the research monograph The Epistemic Innocence of Irrational Beliefs (Oxford University Press 2020), which are outputs of a 5-year project funded by the European Research Council, entitled "Pragmatic and Epistemic Role of Factually Erroneous Cognitions and Thoughts" (PERFECT).

Margaret Kamitsuka (Ph.D., Yale) is the Francis W. and Lydia L. Davis Professor Emeritus of Religion at Oberlin College. She is the author of Feminist Theology and the Challenge of Difference and the newly published Abortion and the Christian Tradition: A Pro-choice Theological Ethic. She edited The Embrace of Eros: Bodies, Desires, and Sexuality in Christianity. Journals where her essays have appeared include the Journal of Religion, the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, and Christianity and Literature. Kamitsuka serves as the book editor for the American Academy of Religion’s Academy Series.

Dr. Markus Ruether is a tenured academic researcher at the Research Center Juelich (Germany). He was academically raised in ancient and continental philosophy, namely in the ethics of the roman stocis and the philosophy of right of G.W.F. Hegel. After his master degree in philosophy he turned to analytic philosophy and studied in Oxford and Harvard under the supervision of Derek Parfit and Tim Scanlon. His PhD thesis covered the topic of moral realism in metaethics. In his current work he focuses on more applied questions, e . g. on the topic of meaning and its normative role in normative ethics and bioethics.

Masahiro Morioka, Professor, Waseda University, Japan. Philosophy of life, metaphysics, applied ethics. Organizer of Tokyo Philosophy Project. Books: (English): Confessions of a Frigid Man: A Philosopher's Journey into the Hidden Layers of Men’s Sexuality, 2005, 2013. (Japanese): Painless Civilization, 2003; Manga Introduction to Philosophy, 2013; How to Live in a Post-Religious Age, 1996, 2019; and others.

Michael Prinzing is a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is a graduate fellow at the Parr Center for Ethics, and works in the Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Lab. His research is about the good life, broadly construed. He’s interested in questions about wellbeing, meaning in life, virtue, and the relationships between these things. He takes a multidisciplinary approach to investigating these topics, believing that normative theorizing should be informed by empirical evidence, and empirical investigation should be guided by normative theory.

Mirela Oliva is Associate Professor and Rudman Chair of Philosophy at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, specializing in philosophy of religion and ethics. She published Das innere Verbum in Gadamers Hermeneutik (Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, 2009) and edited the Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association (2014-2017). She also translated and edited Paul Ricoeur, Tradurre l'intraducibile. Sulla traduzione (Pontificia Urbaniana University Press, Rome, 2008).

Olalere Kunle Oluwafemi is a Ph.D candidate at the University of Ibadan. He is also a Lecturer at the General Studies Department of The Polytechnic Ibadan, Nigeria where he teaches Ethics, Social Philosophy and Developing Realm. His research articles in Ethics, African Philosophy and Developmental Philosophy have been published in different scholarly journals. Currently, his research interest is on War, Displacement and Social Reconstruction in Post- War African States.

Dr Ramon Harvey is the Aziz Foundation Lecturer in Islamic Studies at Ebrahim College in London. He received his MA and PhD from SOAS, University of London. His research focuses on Qur’anic studies, philosophical theology and ethics, both studying the intellectual history of these disciplines and making his own contemporary interventions. Dr Harvey’s first book, The Qur’an and the Just Society, was published by Edinburgh University Press. He is currently writing a monograph in constructive Muslim theology, drawing especially from the Māturīdī tradition. He is also the editor of a new series for Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh Studies in Islamic Scripture and Theology.

Richard Allen. I have BA, BD, M.Ed, Ph.D, in philosophy, education and theology, from UK universities. I taught in Colleges of Education in England and Nigeria, and at the University of the West Indies, Trinidad. I have published 6 books, edited or co-edited 5 others, plus 50+ articles across the world, on philosophy, theology, ethics, education, politics and economics. My special interests include Michael Polanyi, Collingwood, Scheler, Gabriel Marcel, Aurel Kolnai and Lucian Blaga. Current projects: a book which will summarise my principal publications with new work in a personalist philosophy, and one on the tacit dimension of language.

Rosa Ritunnano is a PhD candidate at Birmingham University’s Institute for Mental Health funded through the Priestley PhD scholarship. Her interests are inter-disciplinary, encompassing the phenomenological psychopathology of mental illness and exploring its impact on the experience of meaning in life. Her current research applies philosophical analysis and phenomenological methods to the investigation of delusion-formation in early psychosis, focusing on selfhood, world-experience and existential feelings. Alongside her academic commitments, Rosa is a Consultant Psychiatrist in an NHS team providing Early Intervention in Psychosis.

Sandy Koullas completed her doctoral dissertation, On the Value of Relationships, at Johns Hopkins University in 2017. Her primary research area is ethics, with a particular interest in virtue, practical reason, and relationships. She also has a strong interest in African philosophy, and recently published a chapter on "Love, Practical Reasons, and African Philosophy" in the Routledge Handbook on Love in Philosophy (2019). Since completing her PhD, Sandy has taught several classes on ethics, the philosophy of love, and expository writing at Johns Hopkins and Georgetown University.

Slater Simek is a postgraduate student in Applied Theology at Wycliffe Hall, University of Oxford. Prior to coming to Oxford, Slater did a Master’s in Theological Studies at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. When not researching, Slater can be found spending time with his beautiful wife, Mary, engaging in some form of exercise, or reading great literature.

Søren Harnow Klausen is professor of philosophy at the University of Southern Denmark. He is head of the Values, Welfare and Health research program. Søren Harnow Klausen obtained his PhD at the University of Tübingen, Germany in 1993. He was Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow 2000-2002, member of the Danish Council for Independent Research 2008-2013 and elected member of Science Europe Scientific Advisory Committee 2016. His wide research interests include happiness and wellbeing, value theory, phenomenology, philosophy of mind, social epistemology and philosophy of literature.

Sylwia Wilczewska is a research assistant at the Faculty of Philosophy of the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin. Her areas of interest include philosophy of religion, history of philosophy, epistemology and aesthetics.

Vijay Mascarenhas is an associate professor of philosophy at MSU Denver. He has very eclectic interests in philosophy including, besides, the meaning and value of life: Ancient philosophy, modern philosophy, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science. He has published on Hume, Spinoza, Descartes, Aristotle, philosophy of mind. He regularly teaches a course, “The Meaning of Life and Death,” and is working on a book developed from that course. He received his Ph.D from Yale University, after a A.B. from Harvard.

Will Sharp. I’m a PhD candidate at the University of Birmingham working in philosophy of perception and consciousness. Currently I’m thinking about what place phenomenal consciousness has in our theories of perception. (Spoiler: probably none.) I used to be an Ethics lecturer at a small uni and a community college in Texas. I often had my students there do presentations on what a life’s meaningfulness might consist in.