Rate My Professor Holly Lawford-Smith

Holly Lawford-Smith is an Associate Professor in Political Philosophy in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, Faculty of Arts, at the University of Melbourne, where she also serves as Graduate Studies Coordinator for Philosophy. She earned her BA (Honours) and MA from the University of Otago in New Zealand from 2000 to 2006, followed by a PhD from the Australian National University from 2007 to 2011. Her professional career includes a postdoctoral fellowship with the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University from 2010 to 2011, and another postdoctoral position in the Department of Philosophy, Research School of Social Sciences, at the Australian National University from 2011 to 2012. She held a Lectureship in Philosophy at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom from 2012 to 2017, before joining the University of Melbourne in 2017, initially as a Senior Lecturer and later promoted to Associate Professor.

Lawford-Smith's research specializations lie in moral and political philosophy, encompassing social ontology—including the nature and properties of the social world, collective action, agency, and responsibility—climate ethics, experimental philosophy, and feminism, particularly gender-critical feminism and conflicts of interest between marginalized groups such as women, lesbians, gay people, and trans people. She is the author of several books: Not In Their Name: Are Citizens Culpable for Their States’ Actions? (2019), which received the Annual Montreal Political Theory Manuscript Award and examines whether states act as agents, citizens' culpability for state actions, models of collective agency, and responsibility in contexts like asylum-seeker policies; Gender-Critical Feminism (2022); Sex Matters: Essays in Gender-Critical Philosophy (2023); Is It Wrong To Buy Sex? (2024); and Feminism Beyond Left and Right (2025). Her scholarship addresses legal definitions of sex, women-only spaces, trans inclusion in liberal states, academic freedom, and hate speech laws, contributing to ongoing debates in political philosophy and feminist theory.