Lena Ashooh

Biography

Lena completed her Bachelor’s degree at Harvard University. She created her own degree program and was the first student to graduate Harvard with a degree in Animal Studies. Her research focuses on the philosophy of categories “human” and “animal” and other animal categories. Her research is primarily in the fields of social epistemology, metaphysics, and political and legal philosophy. Her thesis presented an account of the categories “human” and “animal” as demarcations of social groups, as opposed to groups created by an innate or biological essence. She is interested in the correct law and policy mechanisms to defend these groups, and equality writ large, as a result. Lena was Lab Manager of Dr. Irene Pepperberg’s parrot cognition lab. She has completed internships at the Bureau of Land Management, the Justice Defense Fund, the Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment, and the U.S. Congress. She has been a research assistant at a field station in Humacao, Puerto Rico where she observed a society of rhesus macaque monkeys and for a lab studying neurophysiological differences between dog breeds. She has written and published about the role of the field of Animal-Computer Interaction in anti-essentialism about animal categories. At Oxford, she plans to study legal philosophy through the BPhil in Philosophy.