Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Kimberley Brownlee

Kimberley Brownlee is an Associate Professor in Legal and Moral Philosophy at the University of Warwick School of Law. Before joining Warwick in 2012, she was a Lecturer and Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester. She holds a BA in Philosophy (McGill), MPhil in Philosophy (Cambridge), and DPhil in Philosophy (Oxford; Rhodes Scholar). She has held a Canada-US Fulbright Visiting Research Fellowship, Philosophy Department, Vanderbilt University; an HLA Hart Visiting Research Fellowship, University College, Oxford; a Centre for Ethics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs Visiting Fellowship, Philosophy Department, St Andrews University; and a UCLA Law School Visiting Scholar position. She is the Honorary Secretary for the Society for Applied Philosophy and a member of the Executive Committee of the British Philosophical Association. In 2012, she was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize from the Leverhulme Trust.

Her new book is Conscience and Conviction: The Case for Civil Disobedience.

Recently I asked Brownlee what she was reading.  Her reply:
Lately, my partner has been reading to me the Flavia de Luce mysteries by Alan Bradley. My mother recommended them to us as heart-warming and funny - which are great traits in books to real aloud. Flavia is an irrepressible and irresistible eleven year-old with a talent for chemistry and crime investigation. The Flavia books are not whodunnits in the sense that the reader could figure out who the murderer is by paying close enough attention, which is a good thing since I occasionally fall asleep while my partner is reading.

The most unputdownable novels I've read over the last few months are The Taliban Cricket Club, Cutting for Stone, and Sweet Tooth. My recent non-fiction reading has included Moonwalking with Einstein and Turning the Mind into an Ally. And, my current reading for research has focused on human rights. Some of the titles I return to again and again are James Griffin's On Human Rights and James Nickel's Making Sense of Human Rights (2nd ed.).
Learn more about Conscience and Conviction at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue