Hannah Martin

Research Student

Hannah Martin is affiliated with The Open University Law School.

You can email Hannah Martin directly but for media enquiries, please contact a member of The Open University's Media Relations Team.

Biography

Hannah holds first-class honours degrees in BA English Literature (2016) from the University of Aberdeen, and in MA Romantic & Victorian Literature (2017) from Durham University. Hannah also read for a Graduate Diploma in Philosophy (2021) at Durham University, in which her dissertation focused on Shelley's philosophical thought in a critical study alongside three prominent thinkers on idealism: Hume, Berkeley, and Plato. This study made the case that Shelley’s corpus of work synthesises philosophy and poetry, and that Shelley should be thought of as an idealist in his own right.

Following this, Hannah studied an LLM in Professional Legal Practice (2024) at Arden University in which her research project explored John Locke’s theory of personal identity in relation to foetal personhood and abortion legislation in English and Welsh law.

Hannah has experience of working in the higher education sector from previously-held professional support roles, and has recently gained practical experience in the Crown Court as a civil servant within His Majesty’s Courts & Tribunals Service.

Current Research

Feminist Perspectives on Locke: Abortion, Foetal Personhood, and Epistemological Identity.

Hannah’s current research builds on her LLM research project, specifically re-evaluating Lockean legal personhood through feminist-informed perspectives. Hannah’s research aims to investigate the extent to which the concept of legal personhood is certain and consistent across abortion legislation and wider reproductive jurisprudence in England and Wales.

If Locke’s theory of personhood is insufficient, an original theory will be derived from materialism, feminism, and materialist feminism, which offers a nuanced understanding of embodiment, reproduction and politics, especially in the context of women’s domestic labour as social contribution in capitalism, gender hierarchy, and political agency and participation.