2024 CPA Summer Institute Lecture (Meena Krishnamurthy, Queen’s)

Please join us for the public lecture for the 2024 CPA Summer Institute at the University of Toronto, featuring Meena Krishnamurthy, an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at Queen’s University. Dr. Krishnamurthy is a political philosopher who works on race, democracy, social movements, and political psychology. Her work largely concerns the role political emotions play in self and structural transformation. It also 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 book, The Emotions of Nonviolence (Oxford University Press, 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 these emotions.

Dr. Krishnamurthy currently also serves as an associate editor of the Journal of Applied Philosophy.

Talk Title

From Shattered Dreams to Dreams in the Making: Martin Luther King Jr. on the Transformative Power of Democratic Disappointment