Dr Colette Olive

Profile

Before joining Leeds as a teaching fellow, I was a teaching associate at the University of Cambridge where I taught aesthetics, ethics, continental philosophy, and political philosophy. I completed my AHRC-funded doctoral research at Kings College London in 2023. My PhD revived the work of the 19^th century Russian philosopher V.G. Belinsky, reconstructing his ethical and aesthetic framework through the lens of Kantian, Hegelian, and contemporary cognates. I am also the Co-director for the Centre for Philosophy of Art. 

Research interests

My research interests primarily fall into either philosophy of art or the history of philosophy. In the history of philosophy, I have been working lately on the role that love plays in the moral philosophies of a seemingly disparate group of figures: Hegel, Murdoch, and Beauvoir. I’ve continued my doctoral reserach in Russian philosophy with a particular focus on the relationship between Russian and German philosophy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I’m also interested in the aesthetic theories of all these figures, particularly Kant, Murdoch, and Russian philosophers like Belinsky and Berdyaev. In contemporary aesthetics, I’m mostly interested in how we learn from art and how it shapes the way we think about the world. Recently, I have been working on several papers which look at the intersection between art and journalism which I argue generates a helpful framework for understanding the distinctive contributions artworks make to political understanding. 

Qualifications

• BA Philosophy (Kings College London)
• MPhilStud Philosophy (King's College London)
• PhD Philosophy (King's College London)

Professional memberships

• British Society of Aesthetics
• American Society of Aesthetics