We are delighted to announce that the first set of academic staff appointments have joined the School Liberal Arts. We have attracted and appointed five high quality academics, each with impressive teaching and research profiles relative to their career-stage.
In reverse alphabetical order, our new appointments are:
Elena Walsh specialises in the Philosophy of Mind and the Philosophy of Science. She has expertise in related areas including Moral Psychology (especially the relationship between emotion and reason) and Epistemology. She has a longstanding interest in Buddhist, Asian and comparative approaches to philosophy. Her other philosophical interests include the role of emotion in intelligent systems, and the ethical governance of emerging AI. Elena completed her PhD in 2019 at the University of Sydney. Her dissertation adopted a broadly naturalistic approach to provide a theoretical framework that explains how emotional dispositions are constructed in individuals over time. She has previously worked for the Department of Premier and Cabinet as a policy advisor, and as a researcher at the Practical Justice Initiative at the University of New South Wales.
Talia Morag works in Philosophical Psychology and, relatedly, Ethics, specializing in the philosophy of emotion, practical reasoning, the philosophy of psychoanalysis and social psychology. Her broad project is concerned with emotional well-being and making allowance for non-rational aspects of the mind. She draws on insights of Hume, James and Freud in order to construct a new associationist psychology to explain the domain of affect, including emotions, moods and sexuality, as well as unreflective social psychological behaviours such as stereotyping and implicit bias. She also has ongoing research interests in contemporary pragmatism and liberal naturalism. Her book Emotion, Imagination, and the Limits of Reason was published by Routledge (2016). She is the founding director of Psyche + Society, which organizes public conversations in ordinary language about contemporary social problems from a psychoanalytic point of view. Talia held an Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Deakin University, after completing her PhD in philosophy at the University of Sydney. She holds a Master in Philosophy (Magna Cum Laude) from the University of Paris 8, as well as a bachelor’s degree in Physics and a Philosophy Honours degree (Summa Cum Laude) from Tel-Aviv University.
Cathy Mason works primarily on Ethics, and proximate areas of philosophy: Epistemology, especially Moral Epistemology, and Aesthetics. Her recent research focuses on Iris Murdoch, particularly focusing at the points in her work where the aforementioned areas of philosophy converge. Cathy is currently working on a research project concerning Iris Murdoch’s Metaethics. Cathy joins UOW from the University of Oxford, Wadham College, where she currently holds a Stipendiary Lectureship in Philosophy and has taught Ethics, Practical Ethics, Theory of Politics, and Aesthetics and conducted research about friendship. In the summer of 2019, she was awarded a PhD in Philosophy from Trinity College, Cambridge for a thesis entitled ‘Neglected Virtues: Love, Hope, and Humility’. Prior to her time at Cambridge, she finished her master’s degree at the University of Sheffield, and before that she read Philosophy and Theology at Trinity College, Oxford.
Anthony Hooper specialises in Ancient Philosophy, working particularly on Plato and Pre-Socratic Philosophy. His research focuses particularly on intersections between Greek philosophy, poetry, and religion. Anthony’s current major research project is a detailed examination of the presentation of immortality in Plato’s Symposium, and deals particularly with concepts of identity, memory, and inspiration. He is strongly committed to collaborative, interdisciplinary research, and is currently engaged in two such projects: Aspects of Death and the Afterlife in Ancient Greece and Plato on Comedy. His wider research interests extend to Modern Philosophy (particularly 18th and 19th Century German philosophy), Classics (with expertise in Homer and Old Comedy), and Religious Studies. He also has a keen interest in Chinese Philosophy, especially Daoism. Anthony completed his PhD in 2015 in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sydney, and joins us from Durham University, having been employed from 2016-19 as a Junior Research Fellow in the Department of Classics and Ancient History.
Bernardo Ainbinder specializes in Phenomenology and Neo-Kantianism. With a strong background in the History of Philosophy, especially Kant and Aristotle, his research focuses on exploring the import of historical sources for contemporary discussions in metaphysics and meta-ontology. He is working on two closely related projects: a phenomenologically oriented defense of ontological pluralism and an analysis of the transformation of the notions of ‘contingency’, ‘necessity’ and ‘apriority’ in post-phenomenological thinking. Bernardo holds an Honorary Research Fellowship at the Institute for Humanities, Diego Portales University, Chile. He has been a Visiting Researcher at the Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen and a Research Fellow at the National Council for Scientific Research, Argentina. He was the principal investigator of the Chilean National Fund for Scientific Research project Phenomenological Contributions to Transcendental Philosophy: Praxis, Truth and Autonomy and leads the international research network Phenomenology and Naturalism, funded by the Chilean National Council for Scientific Research.
