I’m an Associate Professor in Political Philosophy in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne; an Editorial Board member for Political Philosophy, Journal of Applied Philosophy, and the Journal of Controversial Ideas; a Network Member of the Open University Gender Critical Research Network; a member of Genspect’s Killarney Group Think Tank; a writer for Quillette; and a Featured Author at Fairer Disputations.

I did my BA (Hons) and MA at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand (2000-2006), and my PhD at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra (2007-2011). I had a couple of postdocs in Canberra (first with the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE), Charles Sturt University (2010-2011) and then with the Department of Philosophy in the Research School of Social Sciences, at ANU (2011-2012). My first permanent job was as a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sheffield in the UK (2012-2017), and early in 2017 I moved back to Australia to work at the University of Melbourne, where I am still.

I work in social, moral, and political philosophy, with a particular interest in feminism. Most of my current research is centered on conflicts of interests between marginalized groups of interest to mainstream feminism, in particular women, lesbian and gay people, and trans people. Around work, I do some campaigning for the protection of women’s sex-based rights, and occasionally I put the skills I picked up as a fashion-design-degree-dropout to use, and make an item of clothing. I am currently trying to learn trousers.

You can find me on YouTube as @hollylawford-smith and as a co-contributor to @feministheretics, and on Twitter as @aytchellesse.

Photo credit: the image in my header is of a sculpture by Yinka Shonibare, one of my favourite artists.