Jessica Leech

BA (Cantab), MPhil (London), PhD (Sheffield and Geneva)

Jessica Leech will join the Department in September 2012, after
spending one year as a Junior Research Fellow at King's College,
Cambridge. She did her doctorate jointly at the University of
Sheffield and the University of Geneva (as part of the “Theory of
Essence” research project based at the Eidos Centre for Metaphysics at
the University of Geneva). She did a Master in Philosophical Studies
at King's College London, and she was an undergraduate at King's
College, Cambridge.

Jessica's research interests, contemporary and historical, centre
around the topic of modality. She is currently working on contemporary
issues in the metaphysics of modality, including the notion of
essence, and the relationships between different kinds of necessity.
She is also currently exploring what Kant had to say about modality,
and issues arising from that. Her doctoral thesis “The Varieties of
Modality: Kantian Prospects for a Relativist Account” was an attempt
to bring these two main strands of interest together. Jessica hopes to
start work on a book on Kant and Modality in the near future.

General interests: Philosophy of Kant, metaphysics, philosophical
logic, philosophy of language, and epistemology.