Elizabeth Ashford is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of St Andrews. She did her PhD at Oxford University, and has been a Faculty Fellow in Ethics at the Harvard University Edmund J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, an H. L. A. Hart Visiting Fellow at the Oxford University Centre for Ethics and the Philosophy of Law, and a Laurance S Rockefeller Visiting Fellow at the Center for Human Values at Princeton University.

Her primary research interests are in moral and political philosophy, and her recent work has focused on the human right to subsistence. She participated in a UNESCO research program (convened by Pierre Sane, Assistant Director-General for the Social and Human Sciences and formerly head of Amnesty International), on ‘Towards a New Paradigm in the Fight Against Poverty’, which argued for conceiving life-threatening poverty as a violation that demands abolition. She also participated in a UNESCO panel discussion on poverty and infra-humanisation in Mexico City, and at the recent World Ethics conference in China on the theme of global ethical responses to urgent contemporary challenges. She is currently completing a monograph Hunger’s Witting Executioners: Structural Violations of the Human Right to Subsistence.