This year Regent’s Park College has partnered with the University of Oxford’s CCS7 funding programme to create two fully funded DPhil studentships in Philosophy. After a competitive process of nomination by the Faculty of Philosophy and selection by the Pamela Sue Anderson Studentship committee, we are delighted to announce the recipients of the awards: Mhairi Tait and Anna Videbæk Smith.

Mhairi Tait grew up in Glasgow before studying at Oxford (BA Philosophy and French) and UCL (MPhil Philosophy).

About Mhairi’s research: “My doctoral project aims to give a feminist account of romantic love. It’s commonly held that love cannot be rational. Consider how often we speak about love as a kind of ‘madness’, or as involving a turn away from rational ideals towards (incompatible) romantic ones. I’m interested in the extent to which this anti-rational view of love, which remains pervasive in contemporary philosophical scholarship as well as popular thinking, obscures pathologies in our romantic attachments, encouraging us to invest in unhealthy relationships. Feminists have long been concerned about love as a site of oppression under patriarchy. I hope to contribute a deeper understanding of the relationship between our reasons and our emotions, our ideological commitments and our affective ones.”

Anna Videbæk Smith is a Scottish-Danish feminist philosopher who has studied for an MA (Hons) and MLitt at the University of St Andrews.

About Anna’s research: “My doctoral project examines ageism as an intersectional type of oppression. I explore how ageing is framed as a moral, epistemic, and aesthetic failure in most Western societies, with a particular focus on its disproportionate and distinctive impact on already marginalised groups, such as women and disabled people. Additionally, I consider this argument’s broader implications for our understanding of oppression. In particular, I suggest that we must expand our conception of oppression to accommodate the fact that ageing is an inevitable process rather than a generally fixed social kind, like race or gender. This perspective may also offer valuable insights for understanding other types of discrimination based on more fluid social categories, such as ableism or fatphobia.”

The Pamela Sue Anderson Studentship was founded in memory of Professor Pamela Sue Anderson (1955-2017), Professor of Modern European Philosophy of Religion and a much-loved Tutorial Fellow at Regent’s Park College from 2001-2017. Her research spanned the philosophy of religion, concepts of love and vulnerability, and feminism and metaphilosophy.