Meena Krishnamurthy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Queen’s University. Before this she was an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan in Philosophy and in the Program in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. She also held positions at the University of Manitoba and Dalhousie University. She completed her Ph.D. at Cornell University. She is currently an Associate Editor of the Journal of Applied Philosophy.
Professor Krishnamurthy is a political philosopher who works on democracy, race, social movements, and political psychology. Her early work – which drew on John Rawls’s writings – offered novel justifications for the value of democracy.
Krishnamurthy’s current work is about the role political emotions play in the self and structural transformation that is needed for genuine democracy. Her recent work explores how civil rights activists – especially Martin Luther King, Jr. – used protest, images, letters, and oratory to engage these emotions and to motivate transformative political action.
Her forthcoming book, The Emotions of Nonviolence (Oxford University Press, April 2025), revisits King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” not just to mine yet another argument for, or about, civil disobedience, but also to uncover a novel account of how moral emotions motivate nonviolent action; and reciprocally, how nonviolent action channels and sustains these emotions.