Dr Lea Cantor has been awarded the Oxford Nicolas Berggruen Prize for Best Doctoral Dissertation in Philosophy, Law & Politics 2024.

This prestigious prize, funded by the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles, is awarded to work that is both excellent and transformative in either theory or practice. The selection process is rigorous, with one dissertation nominated by each of the three faculties in Oxford (Philosophy, Law, and DPIR) every year, and the final selection made among the three highly impressive nominees by a committee constituted by the terms of the prize.

Dr Lea Cantor’s winning dissertation is titled ‘Ancient Philosophy within a Global Purview: Parmenides and Zhuangzi on Expressing what Can (and Cannot) be Known’. She argues that “widespread misconceptions about the early history of philosophy undermine the study of ancient philosophy from a global perspective,” challenging the influential origin narrative of a shift from myth to reason that misrepresents the history of ancient Greek philosophy and underpins the marginalisation of so-called ‘non-Western’ philosophical traditions. Her dissertation examines “how the received narrative engenders interpretive blind spots within specialist work on ancient philosophy by exploring two foundational philosophers of early Greek and classical Chinese philosophy, Parmenides and Zhuangzi”. The result is a piece of work that the examiners considered “an impressive and markedly original thesis,” and which will become the basis for a monograph.

Dr Cantor completed her DPhil at Worcester in 2023 and is currently a Carmen Blacker Research Fellow in Philosophy at Peterhouse, Cambridge. She will be taking up a permanent Lectureship in the History of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield from September 2025. Apart from her research and teaching, Lea has assumed a lead role in advocacy efforts relating to the representation and study of non-European philosophies in university education and beyond: she founded Philiminality, a student-run platform for cross-cultural and interdisciplinary philosophy at Oxford and Cambridge and has organised and raised funding for numerous talks, panels, mentoring schemes, and international conferences addressing aspects of Chinese, Arabic and Islamic, African, Mesopotamian, Indian, Japanese, and Latin American philosophy.

In the future, Dr Cantor intends to continue supporting projects of this kind as a member of the Management Committee of the British Society for the History of Philosophy and of the American Philosophical Association’s Committee on International Cooperation.