ELSA KUGELBERG

I’m a political theorist at the University of Oxford, where I hold a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellowship at Nuffield College.

My research asks what justice requires of social institutions in domains political theory has largely overlooked – sex, digital life, dating, care work, and friendship – and what those requirements demand of the actors that shape them. You can read more here.

My work has been published or is forthcoming in American Political Science Review, Politics, Philosophy & Economics, European Journal of Political Theory, Journal of Business Ethics, Jurisprudence, and Journal of Medical Ethics. You can read the abstracts here. My APSR article on online dating was selected for APSA’s public scholarship programme and has been widely covered in the Swedish media, including public radio. You can read more here.

With Henrik D. Kugelberg, I am the incoming co-PI of two research projects (€1M in total – funded by the Swedish Research Council and Formas), described under research.

I received my DPhil (PhD) in Politics from the University of Oxford in November 2023. My dissertation, Just Sex, was awarded Oxford DPIR’s 2023–24 prize for the best doctoral thesis in Political Theory. My doctoral research was supervised by Zofia Stemplowska and Jonathan Wolff and generously funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. Besides Oxford, I was trained at Stanford University’s Center for Ethics in Society, the London School of Economics’s Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method (MSc Philosophy and Public Policy), and Uppsala University (BSocSci Politics and Law). I spent 2025 on parental leave.

I am a member of the Oxford Centre for the Study of Social Justice and an affiliated researcher at the Machine Intelligence and Normative Theory Lab at Johns Hopkins University, and at Karolinska Institutet’s Global and Sexual Health Research Group.

I am a contributing writer for Sweden’s largest morning paper, Dagens Nyheter, where my columns, editorials, essays, and critique have regularly appeared since 2013. Before I started my DPhil, I was an editor at a publisher focused on popular philosophy and science. I have also worked as a political advisor and speechwriter in the Swedish Parliament, focusing in particular on foreign affairs, defence policy, and the European Union. Before that I was a trainee at the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs.

My CV and academic references can be provided on request. You can contact me at elsa.kugelberg[at]politics.ox.ac.uk.