Dr Alba Curry

Responsibilities

• Assessment Lead

Research interests

My most recent work explores the relevance of anger to contemporary society, particularly moral and political life. I try to straddle the line between philosophy’s universalist impulses and the critical, contextualizing moves of recent feminist philosophy. I’m a specialist in early Greek and Chinese philosophy and am committed to bringing diverse philosophical traditions into dialogue and to bear on our current time. I also moonlight as an expert on the ethics of artificial intelligence and have worked with experts in that field on a variety of projects. (Usually this involves me playing Socrates in a roomful of computer programmers and neuroscientists.)

The interest in A.I. probably stems from the fact that I’m a philosopher who thought she would be designing video games. (I even took an undergrad degree in digital humanities.) While I no longer design them, I do still enjoy playing video games—the more sci-fi the better. As a teacher, I encourage my students to find philosophy in all areas of life. When, however, I have the urge to pull my head out of a philosophy book, I enjoy painting, knitting, and reading contemporary Japanese fiction. I keep my language skills sharp by translating hip hop lyrics into Classical Greek and Chinese and highly recommend the activity. 

I’m especially keen on working with any students interested in ancient China or Greece, philosophy of emotions, and feminist or A.I. philosophies. I’m a cultural hybrid and have lived, studied, or worked in Spain, the UK, Australia, Austria, Japan, China, and the US.

Qualifications

• BA/MA Philosophy/Arts & Media Informatics (University of Glasgow)
• MA Chinese Philosophy (Fudan University, Shanghai, China)
• PhD Comparative Literature (University of California, Riverside)

Professional memberships

• Emotion and Society Lab

Research groups and institutes

• Centre for Aesthetic, Moral and Political Philosophy