Amia Srinivasan

Amia Srinivasan is the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford and a contributing editor at the LRB. Her first book, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the 21st Century, was published in 2021. The title essay was first published in the LRB as ‘Does anyone have the right to sex?’ She’s also written for the paper on subjects including free speech on campus, pronouns, octopuses, bestiality and sharks.

The Sucker, the Sucker! What’s it like to be an octopus?

Amia Srinivasan, 7 September 2017

Octopuses frustrate the neat evolutionary division between clever vertebrates and simple-minded invertebrates. They are sophisticated problem solvers; they learn, and can use tools; and they show a capacity for mimicry, deception and, some think, humour. Just how refined their abilities are is a matter of scientific debate: their very strangeness makes octopuses hard to study. Their intelligence is like ours, and utterly unlike ours. They are the closest we can come, on earth, to knowing what it might be like to encounter intelligent aliens.

Bundles: Remembering Derek Parfit

Amia Srinivasan, 19 January 2017

Amia Srinivasan’s article in this issue first appeared on the LRB blog. You can read it here.

From The Blog

Remembering Derek Parfit

6 January 2017

I first met Derek Parfit the summer I was 19, when my college boyfriend and I spent a day visiting Oxford. Parfit’s Reasons and Persons was the only thing written by a living person on our first-year philosophy syllabus at Yale. Passing All Souls College, we went to the porter’s lodge and asked, absurdly, if we could see him. The porter said Parfit was teaching a seminar in the Old Library. We stood outside the door, pressing our ears to it, hearing nothing but murmurs, debating whether or not to go in. Eventually the seminar ended and people started to file out. Realising we had no idea what Parfit looked like, we asked every man leaving the room if he was Derek Parfit. They all laughed: they must have been twenty-something graduate students. Finally, out came a man with a mane of white hair and a bright red tie tucked into his trousers, wielding a large Smirnoff vodka bottle. We introduced ourselves.

Letter

What are we allowed to say?

21 September 2016

David Bromwich worries about the coddling of students on American university campuses. But he makes his case too easy for himself by downplaying the underlying causes of their disgruntlement. Yale, where Bromwich teaches and where I was an undergraduate, remains one of the most racially segregated places I’ve ever spent time in. On the whole, in the dining halls, and in the classrooms too, white...
From The Blog

The Distinction between an Argument and Its Likely Effects

16 August 2016

‘I envision a world in which a person with multiple disabilities can be euthanised, with an agreement from the guardians, when it is difficult for the person to carry out household and social activities.’ These are the words of Satoshi Uematsu, the 26-year-old man who killed 19 disabled men and women in a care home in a Tokyo suburb last month, in the biggest mass murder Japan has seen since the Second World War.

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Podcasts & Videos

Podcast

Cancelled

Amia Srinivasan and Malin Hay

4 July 2023

Amia Srinivasan discusses the UK’s recent appointment of a ‘free speech tsar’, whether students are increasingly leaning left and how activists across the political spectrum weaponise the concept...

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