Katerina Jennings

Katerina ‘Kat’ Jennings is a DPhil candidate in Philosophy at the University of Oxford, funded by the Faculty of Philosophy and the St Cross Uehiro Scholarship for Future Generations. 

Kat’s research spans moral philosophy, practical ethics, feminist philosophy, and social and political theory. Her thesis, The Ethics of Single-Sex Spaces, examines how institutions organised around sex and gender - including elite sport, child and adolescent healthcare, and prisons - should balance values such as fairness, autonomy, safety, equality, and inclusion. Rather than centring abstract disputes about the much-discussed ‘what is a woman?’ metaphysical question, Kat’s research asks what these institutions are for and what values they promote - or ought to promote - and therefore how their rules should be designed in practice. She is supervised by Prof. Tom Sinclair, Dr. Jonathan Pugh, and Dr. César Palacios-González.

Kat has presented her research at conferences including the Society for Applied Philosophy Annual Conference (SAP), the American Philosophical Association Pacific Division Meeting (APA), the Aristotelian Society-Mind Association Joint Session, the International Association for the Philosophy of Sport (IAPS), and the World Congress of Philosophy. Most recently, she was an invited speaker alongside three professors at an APA symposium entitled Transgender Athletes in Sport.

A version of her Master’s dissertation, developed at the Uehiro Institute, was published in the American Journal of Bioethics, and she has also contributed a forthcoming chapter on transgender inclusion and fairness in sport to The Oxford Handbook of Sports Ethics (Oxford University Press). Her public-facing book project, Gender Ethics: The New Gender Debates, co-authored with Prof. Brian Earp, is under contract with Polity and forthcoming in 2028. Her work on the history and ethics of sex verification in sport has also been featured in Rolling Stone.

Originally from London, Kat moved to New York in 2014 to study at New York University (NYU), where she completed a BA in Philosophy with High Honours, alongside minors in Mathematics and Physics. Her undergraduate dissertation was supervised by Prof. Samuel Scheffler. She subsequently worked in wealth management at Morgan Stanley and later helped launch a venture capital firm investing in early-stage, ethically minded industrial technologies across energy, manufacturing, aerospace, and space. The firm’s portfolio was acquired by Andreessen Horowitz in 2024, allowing Kat to obtain her UK-US dual citizenship.

At Oxford, Kat teaches Ethics, Practical Ethics, Feminist Theory, and first-year Moral Philosophy across several colleges. Beyond the University, she volunteer-teaches in UK prisons through Philosophy in Prisons, a program supported by the Uehiro Institute, building on her earlier experience teaching philosophy and debate at Rikers Island Correctional Facility in New York.

She currently serves as the Women and Gender Minorities Representative for Oxford’s Faculty of Philosophy and is committed to making philosophy accessible, practically useful, and relevant beyond the academy.

Selected publication

K. Jennings and E. Braun, "Beyond Suppressing Testosterone: A Categorical System to Achieve a ‘Level Playing Field’ in Sport," American Journal of Bioethics (2023).