Rate My Professor Josh Milburn

Josh Milburn is a Senior Lecturer in Political Philosophy within the Political Science faculty at Loughborough University, where he leads the Politics, Philosophy, and Economics programme and serves as Deputy Undergraduate Programme Lead for the Department of International Relations, Politics, and History. He earned his BA and MA in Philosophy from Lancaster University between 2009 and 2013 and his PhD in Philosophy from Queen’s University Belfast from 2013 to 2016, with a thesis titled "The Political Turn in Animal Ethics," funded by Northern Ireland’s Department for Employment and Learning. Milburn joined Loughborough in 2022 as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in Political Philosophy, completing his fellowship in 2023 and being promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2025. His previous appointments include British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Sheffield from 2019 to 2022, where his project was Food Justice and Animals: Feeding the World Respectfully; Associate Lecturer in Political Philosophy at the University of York from 2017 to 2019; and Postdoctoral Fellow in Animal Studies at Queen’s University in Canada from 2016 to 2017.

Milburn is an analytic moral and political philosopher whose primary research interest lies in animal ethics, investigating the implications of taking animals seriously for questions in moral, legal, and political philosophy, including food systems, alternative proteins like cultivated meat, animals in warfare, hate speech protections, property rights, and libertarian political thought. He is the author of Just Fodder: The Ethics of Feeding Animals (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022) and Food, Justice, and Animals: Feeding the World Respectfully (Oxford University Press, 2023), with a forthcoming monograph titled Animals, State, and Utopia: Robert Nozick’s Animal Ethics (Oxford University Press). Milburn has produced nearly twenty journal articles and several book chapters, significantly impacting animal rights discourse within political theory. He was awarded the 2024 British and Ireland Association for Political Thought Early-Career Prize for his outstanding contributions to research and teaching. Further, he hosts the animal studies podcast Knowing Animals since 2020, regularly co-convenes the Animal Politics sessions at the MANCEPT Workshops since 2019, and serves on the Research Advisory Committee of The Vegan Society. His teaching covers ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of science, and metaphilosophy, and he welcomes PhD proposals aligning with his interests in analytic moral and political philosophy and animal studies.