Anna Golova

My DPhil research investigates the relationship between mental illness and the self. I am interested in questions that can arise for diagnosed individuals (e.g., ‘Is this experience due to my mental illness or is this just who I am?’), as well as for clinicians (e.g., ‘Is this treatment decision what the person truly wants or is it their “mental illness talking”?’). I scrutinize whether we can really draw a conceptual distinction between self and mental illness in such contexts.

My DPhil project is supervised by Dr Jonathan Pugh and Prof Edward Harcourt and generously funded by the Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC DTP and Merton College Oxford. Before the DPhil, I completed the Oxford BPhil in Philosophy, for which I received the Gilbert Ryle Prize for the best performance in 2023. Before that, I earned an MA in Philosophy from King's College London and a BA in Liberal Arts and Sciences from the University of Freiburg in Germany.

For publications, please see https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5551-6213