More about me



Education 


In 1997 I received my first degree in Philosophy (Laurea summa cum laude in Filosofia) at the Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna with a dissertation on conceptual relativism supervised by Eva Picardi. For five months during my degree I was an Erasmus student at the University of Leeds, focusing on the history and philosophy of science.

In 1998 I got an MA in Philosophy with distinction from King's College London where, supervised by Donald Gillies, I wrote a dissertation on the rationality of scientific revolutions. In 2000 I obtained the BPhil in Philosophy (University of Oxford) with a dissertation on the rationality debate in philosophy and the cognitive sciences under the supervision of Bill Newton-Smith.

After the BPhil, I moved to the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University in Canberra. I worked on my PhD under the supervision of Martin Davies in the Philosophy Programme. My thesis was a challenge to Donald Davidson's rationality constraint on the ascription of beliefs.


Lisa giving a talk


Academic posts

After being awarded the PhD in 2004, I worked for one year as a Research Associate on the EC-funded project EU-RECA (on the concept of research and the ethical regulation of research activities) coordinated by John Harris at the Centre for Social Ethics and Policy at the University of Manchester. During that time, I was also Honorary Lecturer in Bioethics at the Centre.

Next I joined the University of Birmingham, where I was Lecturer (2005-2008), Senior Lecturer (2008-2011), and Reader in Philosophy (2011-2013). I am now Professor of Philosophy, affiliated both with the Philosophy Department in the College of Arts and Law, and the Institute for Mental Health in the College of Life and Environmental Sciences.