Dr Cecily Whiteley

BA, MPhil, PhD

Director of Studies

College Roles

Director of Studies in Philosophy

Contact

Biography

Dr Cecily Whiteley is an Isaac Newton Trust Academic Career Development Research Fellow in the Faculty of Philosophy, and Fellow and Director of Studies in Philosophy at Magdalene College.

Before coming to Cambridge, she completed her PhD in Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy, Logic, and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics and Political Science (2022), and an MPhil at King’s College London (2018). During the 2021-2022 academic year she was a visiting scholar at the Centre for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at New York University.

Cecily is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and in 2018 she won an LSE Class Teaching Award for Excellence in Teaching based on student feedback.

Research Interests

Cecily’s research focuses on the nature of subjective experience and its place in a scientific view of the world. Her PhD examined how longstanding philosophical puzzles concerning the possibility of a mature science of consciousness can be overcome using tools drawn from history and philosophy of science.

Her current research project lies at the intersection of philosophy, psychiatry, and neuroscience and is centred around a new ‘global state of consciousness model’ of Major Depressive Disorder. The first paper from this project ‘Depression as a Disorder of Consciousness’ is published in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science and won the LSE Karl Popper Memorial Prize. The paper has also featured on Psychology Today in a ‘Most Popular’ article of 2021 written by Professor Mark D. White.