Valentina Arena

Valentina Arena is Reader in Roman History at University College London. Her work focuses mainly on the history of ideas and political thought, its relationship with the practice of politics at Rome and the study of Roman oratory and rhetorical techniques. She is the author of Libertas and the Practice of Politics in the late Roman Republic (Cambridge University Press 2012). Her essays have appeared in a wide range of scholarly journals and edited volumes. She is currently working on Roman juridical thought.

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Gregory Claeys

Gregory Claeys is Professor of the History of Political Thought in the History Department at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has previously held teaching and research positions at Cambridge University and in Germany. His research interests include the history of radicalism and socialism in nineteenth-century Britain, utopianism 1700-2001, Social Darwinism and Eugenics, and British intellectual history from 1750 to the present. His main publications include Citizens and Saints: Politics and Anti-Politics in Early British Socialism (Cambridge University Press: 1989), Thomas Paine: Social and Political Thought (Unwin Hyman: 1989), Machinery, Money and the Millennium: From Moral Economy to Socialism, 1815–1860 (Princeton University Press: 1987), Imperial Sceptics: British Anti-Imperialism 1850-1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Searching for Utopia: the History of an Idea (Thames & Hudson, 2011). He has also editedUtopias of the British Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press: 1994) and The Owenite Socialist Movement: Pamphlets and Correspondence (2006), 10 vols.

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Hannah Dawson

Hannah took a double first in History from the University of Cambridge. She went on to do her MPhil and PhD there, working on early-modern theories of language, and their relationship to natural, moral and political philosophy, especially in the work of John Locke. She was elected to a Junior Research Fellowship at Queens’ College, Cambridge, and taught at the University of Edinburgh, and then New College of the Humanities, before arriving at King’s. She received a major British Academy Research Development Award for her Clarendon Edition of Locke’s Disputations on the law nature, and held the inaugural Balzan-Skinner Lectureship at the University of Cambridge to work on the normativity of nature in early-modern thought. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She is the author of Life Lessons from Hobbes (Pan Macmillan, 2013) and Locke, language and early-modern philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

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Serena Ferente

Dr Ferente is Senior Lecturer in Medieval European History at King’s College London. She studied at the Scuola Normale of Pisa, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales of Paris, and the European University Institute of Florence.

Her research interests lie in the political history of late medieval and Renaissance Italy. She has published widely on parties, partisan identities and political networks in fifteenth-century Italy, with a particular focus on actors resisting processes of state-building. She continues to work on the history of political languages and the use of body metaphors, including gendered metaphors and emotion-metaphors, in late medieval and Renaissance Europe. She is currently preparing the volume on fifteenth-century Europe for the new Oxford History of Medieval Europe.

Serena was a fellow of the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in 2009/10 and a François Braudel Senior Fellow at the European University Institute in 2014. She is the PI of the project ‘Cultures of Voting in Pre-Modern Europe’ (tinyurl.com/culturesofvoting), funded in 2014 by the British Academy.

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Andrew Fitzmaurice

I completed my PhD at Cambridge and spent many years teaching at the University of Sydney, before joining Queen Mary in 2020. My research has focused upon the ideologies of European empires. My early work concerned the political ideas of early American colonisation. More recently I have been concerned with Europeans’ justifications for the appropriation of land and sovereignty in the non-European world from the sixteenth century through to the twentieth. My ongoing research interests include the political thought of non-state entities, particularly chartered companies.

Niall O’Flaherty

Niall O’ Flaherty is Lecturer in the History of European Political Thought at King’s College London. His research focuses on eighteenth and nineteenth-century social, religious and scientific thought in Britain with particular reference to Thomas Robert Malthus and Charles Darwin. It examines the changing nexus between theology, science and social thought, as well as questions relating to the secularization of social discourse in the period. His forthcoming book gives an historical account of political and religious thought in Britain at the end of the eighteenth century, focusing particularly on the most influential thinker of the period, William Paley (1743-1805). He is also more generally interested in European Political ideas in the Enlightenment.

Angus Gowland

Angus Gowland is currently Reader in Intellectual History at University College London, having previously been a College Lecturer at Christ’s College, Cambridge and Research Fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge. His main research interest is in early-modern European intellectual history, and more particularly sixteenth- and seventeenth-century philosophy, medicine, and psychology. He teaches courses on the history of European political thought ranging from ancient Greece to the nineteenth century, on political thought in the  Renaissance, on ideas about human nature in the Renaissance, and on the methodology of intellectual history. His principal research investigates early-modern ideas about the disease of melancholy, addressing the interaction in this area between humanist medicine, ethics, theology and politics, and exploring their broad cultural-historical significance. He has previously published on the idea of melancholy in early modern Europe, the history of rhetoric and political thought, and the methodology of intellectual history.  He is currently working on a new edition of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy for Penguin Classics, and his book, The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context is available from Cambridge University Press.

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Julian Hoppit

Julian Hoppit is the Astor Professor of British History at UCL. Originally an economic historian, his work now mainly focusses upon the history of political economy, both as practice and discourse, between the mid-seventeenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Thus he is concerned with the nature of the state in Britain and the influence exerted upon its development by interests and ideas. He published Risk and failure in English business, 1700-1800 (CUP, 1987) and A land of liberty? England, 1689-1727 (OUP, 2000), and is now (late 2015) completing Britain’s political economies, 1660-1800 (CUP). He has published articles in journals as varied as the Historical Journal (a journal he edited for four years), Past and Present, and the Economic History Review.

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Maurizio Isabella

Maurizio Isabella is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at Queen Mary University of London. He has been Research Fellow at Birkbeck College, London, and held the Stanley J Seeger fellowship with the Program in Hellenic Studies, Princeton University. Dr. Isabella’s interests include the political thought and the intellectual history of the Risorgimento, the study of international intellectual history in the nineteenth century, and in particular the relationship between Europe and the Mediterranean. Maurizio’s Risorgimento in Exile was published by Oxford University press in 2009. He is currently working on the geopolitical thought of the Risorgimento in a broad comparative framework.

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Leslie James

Dr. Leslie James is a Senior Lecturer in Global History at QMUL. Her research examines the political and intellectual history of Africa and the African diaspora, with particular interest in black radical discourses and the global and local dimensions of anti-colonial movements in the twentieth century. I have completed two books, one on the political practice of the anti-colonial organiser, George Padmore, and a co-edited volume on Decolonization and the Cold War. George Padmore and Decolonization from Below emphasizes the strategies and tactics of a central figure of radical anti-colonial movements in the first half of the twentieth century. Dr. Leslie James’s work  now focuses on the intellectual debates contained outside of the structures of formal text manuscripts and, rather, in the everyday letters, editorials, and news items of the ephemeral press. I am examining newspapers in West Africa and the Caribbean as creative sites of circulation in the late colonial period.

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Susan James

Susan James is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, London. She has previously taught at the University of Connecticut and Cambridge University. Leslie James has been a visiting Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University, at the Institute for Advanced Study of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Her overlapping areas of philosophical research are the history of seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophy, political and social philosophy, and feminist philosophy. Her main publications include The Content of Social Explanation (Cambridge University Press: 1984) , Passion and Action: The Emotions in Early Modern Philosophy (Oxford University Press:1997) and as editor (with Stephanie Palmer) , Visible Women: Essays in Legal Theory and Political Philosophy , (Hart: 2002), and The Political Writings of Margaret Cavendish (Cambridge University Press: 2003).

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Axel Körner

Axel Körner is Professor of Modern History at University College London and Director of the UCL Centre for Transnational History. His main areas of interest are the intellectual and cultural history of Europe from the late eighteenth to the twentieth century. A related field of research is the history of nineteenth-century opera, with a particular interest in the works of Giuseppe Verdi. His publications include a monograph on the French and German labour movements during the nineteenth century as well as Politics of Culture in Liberal Italy (2008; 2011). He is editor of 1848: A European Revolution? (2000; 2003); Opera and Nation in nineteenth-century Italy (2012); and America Imagined: Explaining the United States in Nineteenth-Century Europe and Latin America (with Nicola Miller and Adam Smith, 2012; 2016). His new book America in Italy. The United States in the Political Thought and the Imagination of the Italian Risorgimento, 1763-1865 is forthcoming with Princeton University Press. Supported by a three-year research award from the Leverhulme Trust, he is currently working on a project entitled Transnational Monarchy. Rethinking the Habsburg Empire, 1804-1918.

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Avi Lifschitz

Avi Lifschitz is Senior Lecturer at the UCL History Department, specialising in eighteenth-century European intellectual history. He is particularly interested in the links between Enlightenment anthropology, theology, and political theory (mostly in Germany and France). Another significant aspect of Avi’s research concerns translation and cross-cultural transfer; he is also interested in the history of universities, royal academies, and exiled intellectuals in the eighteenth century.

He is the author of Language and Enlightenment: The Berlin Debates of the Eighteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2012) and editor of Engaging with Rousseau (Cambridge University Press, 2016), as well as “Rousseau’s Imagined Antiquity” – a special issue of History of Political Thought (2016). In addition, he has co-edited Rethinking Lessing’s Laokoon (forthcoming) and Epicurus in the Enlightenment (Voltaire Foundation, 2009).

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Chris Moffat

Dr. Chris Moffat is a Senior Lecturer in South Asian History at QMUL. His research focuses on questions of historical methodology, especially where the discipline of history grapples with alternative conceptions of time and space, the interruptive influence of the dead, and the fraying or tangled threads of memory. He has written extensively on the Indian revolutionary martyr Bhagat Singh (1907-1931), tracing his continuing political potential into the twenty-first century and asking what it means to take such revenant figures seriously in the history of political thought. Chris Moffat has a consonant interest in alternative or dissident commemorative practices, particularly as they relate to public space, public art and the politics of archival and architectural preservation.

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Jason Peacey

Jason Peacey is Professor in the Department of History at UCL and specializes in British history of the early modern period. His work focuses on the politics and political culture of early modern Britain and Europe. He has a particular interest in the relationship between print culture and political life, and consequently focuses on the censorship and exploitation of the press by the political elite and the ways in which contemporaries experienced the early modern ‘information revolution’. He is currently undertaking a major project on Anglo-Dutch political culture in the seventeenth century, in terms of what contemporary print culture reveals about issues such as sovereignty, citizenship and political cooperation in early modern Europe, as well as a microhistory relating to a multi-generational property dispute in early modern Gloucestershire. He is the author of Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004) and Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), and editor of The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001).

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Alexander Samson

Alexander Samson teaches early modern Spanish and Latin American literature and culture, as well as specialised courses on the Golden Age comedia , the conquest of Mexico and early colonial history, the works of Cervantes and in particular Don Quixote . His research interests include the reign and marriage of Philip II and Mary Tudor, translation and the rise of vernacular languages, festival books and court culture, the history and politics of the Habsburg Empire under Charles V and Philip II, early modern political philosophy, New World prose narrative and thecomedia . He is the author of numerous articles on such subjects as racial purity in 16th century Spain, international marriage treaties, the restaging of civic triumphs in the theatre, and the editor of volumes on 1623: The Spanish Match (Ashgate: 2006), A Companion to Lope de Vega (Tamesis: 2008) and Locus Amoenus: Gardens and Horticulture in the Renaissance (Blackwell: 2013).

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Peter Schröder

Peter Schröder is Senior Lecturer in European Social and Political Studies and in History at University College London. His research focuses on comparative approaches to the history of British and continental European political thought from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. In particular, he has worked on natural law theories, the early enlightenment and international political thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He has been visiting professor at universities in Paris, Rome and Seoul, and visiting research fellow at the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium. His single authored publications include: Die Leitbegriffe der deutschen Jugendbewegung in der Weimarer Republik. Eine ideengeschichtliche Studie (Münster 1996); Naturrecht und absolutistisches Staatsrecht. Eine vergleichende Studie zu Thomas Hobbes und Christian Thomasius (Berlin 2001); Klaus Mann zur Einführung (Hamburg 2002); Niccolò Machiavelli (Frankfurt/Main 2004) and Hobbes (Stuttgart 2012). He has also edited 6 volumes of which the latest are: together with O. Asbach, War the State and International Law in Seventeenth-Century Europe (Farnham/Surrey 2010); together with O. Asbach, Research Companion to the Thirty Years War (Farnham/Surrey   2014); and a German translation and edition of T. Hobbes, Behemoth or the long Parliament (Hamburg 2015).

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Will Selinger

Will Selinger is Lecturer in European History, 1700-1850. He is a historian of political thought whose research has focused on the emergence of representative democracy in the modern world and on the crises to which this political form has repeatedly been subject. His first book, Parliamentarism: From Burke to Weber, winner of the 2017 Montreal Annual Political Theory Manuscript Award, was published by Cambridge University Press in the Ideas in Context series. His current research project is on the intellectual origins of the constitutional court in the eighteenth century.

Quentin Skinner

Quentin Skinner is the Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities in the School of History at Queen Mary University of London.  His research centres on the intellectual history of early-modern Europe, with a special focus on the history of rhetoric and on the works of Machiavelli and Hobbes.  He has also published on a number of philosophical issues, including the nature of interpretation and historical explanation, and on several topics in contemporary political theory, in particular the concept of political liberty and the character of the State.  Amongst his main publications are The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (CUP, 1978), Machiavelli (OUP, 1981), Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (CUP, 1996), Liberty Before Liberalism (CUP, 1998) Visions of Politics, 3 vols.(CUP, 2002) Hobbes and Republican Liberty (CUP, 2008) and Forensic Shakespeare (OUP, 2014).

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Gareth Stedman Jones

Gareth Stedman Jones is Professor in the School of History at Queen Mary, University of London, in September 2010. He has been, since 1991, Director of the Centre for History and Economics, Cambridge, as well as Professor of Political Science, History Faculty, Cambridge University, between 1997 and 2010, and a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge University since 1974. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Historical Society.

His publications include An End to Poverty? London, 2004; Columbia University Press, 2005; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Harmondsworth, 2002, introduction of 180pp.; Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832-1982, Cambridge, 1983; Outcast London, Oxford, 1971 [reprinted with new preface, 1984; reprinted Harmondsworth, 1992; Open University edition, 2002, new edition Verso 2013],Religion and the Political Imagination, co-edited with Ira Katznelson, Cambridge, 2010 and The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought, co-edited with Gregory Claeys, Cambridge, 2011. His next major work Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion, A Life will be published by Penguin in August 2016.

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Iain Stewart

Iain Stewart is a Lecturer in Modern European History at UCL, having previously taught at Queen Mary University of London, the Institut d’études politiques de Paris and the University of Manchester. He works on modern French intellectual history but has broader interests in the cultural cold war and the intellectual history of neoliberalism. Dr Stewart’s ongoing research projects include a study of French intellectuals in London during the Second World War and a book on Raymond Aron and the history of French liberalism. He is particularly interested in the so-called ‘French liberal revival’ of the 1970s and 1980s and has co-edited a book on this subject with Stephen W. Sawyer called In Search of the Liberal Moment: Democracy, Anti-totalitarianism and Intellectual Politics in France since 1950 (New York: Palgrave, 2016).

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Adam Sutcliffe

Adam Sutcliffe joined the department of History at King’s College London in 2005 as Lecturer in Early Modern History, following six years teaching at the University of Illinois, USA.  He became Head of Department in August 2012. He studied for his PhD (awarded in 1998) at University College London, receiving his MA from Sussex and BA from Cambridge. He has held fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania, the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, and the University of Leipzig. Dr Sutcliffe specialises in the intellectual history of Western Europe, c.1650-1850, and also in the history of Jews, Judaism and Jewish/non-Jewish relations in Europe from 1600 to the present. He is the author of Judaism and Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 2003), a study of the philosophical and political significance of Judaism and Jews in European Enlightenment thought. He has also recently published a co-edited volume, Philosemitism in History (CUP, 2011). His current research focuses on the relationship between religion, issues of religious difference and radical politics in western European thought in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He is also the co-edtitor of the forthcoming seventh volume of the Cambridge History of Judaism, covering the period 1500-1815.

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Barbara Taylor

Barbara Taylor is Professor of Humanities at Queen Mary, where she teaches on the History and English programmes. Her interests lie in feminist history and theory, British Enlightenment thought, and the subjective aspects of intellectual/political change. Her publications include Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (1983, 2016); Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (2003); On Kindness (with Adam Phillips, 2009); The Last Asylum (2014). In the late 1990s she ran an international research project on ‘Feminism and Enlightenment’ which resulted in a collection of thirty-nine essays: Women, Gender and Enlightenment, 1650-1850 (co-ed with Sarah Knott, 2005). She is an editor of History Workshop Journal, and co-convenor of a long-standing seminar at the Institute of Historical Research on ‘Psychoanalysis and History’. In 2012 she and Sally Alexander published a volume of essays arising from the IHR seminar: History and Psyche: Culture, Psychoanalysis and the Past. She is currently writing an intellectual history of solitude in Enlightenment Britain.

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Georgios Varouxakis

Georgios Varouxakis is Professor of the History of Political Thought in the School of History at Queen Mary University of London and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought (http://projects.history.qmul.ac.uk/hpt/ ). His work to date has focused mainly on nineteenth-century political thought (British and French) with a particular emphasis on John Stuart Mill and, to a lesser extent, Walter Bagehot, Matthew Arnold, Alexis de Tocqueville, François Guizot and Auguste Comte. He is the author of books such as Mill on Nationality (Routledge, 2002), Victorian Political Thought on France and the French (Palgrave Macmillan 2002), and Liberty Abroad: J. S. Mill on International Relations (Cambridge University Press, Ideas in Context Series, 2013). Georgios is also the co-editor of the volumes Utilitarianism and Empire (2005) and John Stuart Mill – Thought and Influence: The saint of rationalism (2010). He has also written many academic articles on political thought on nationalism and cosmopolitanism, empire, and on the intellectual history of ideas of ‘Europe’ and ‘the West’ and attitudes towards the EEC/EU. He is currently engaged in a major research project on French, British and American international political thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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Waseem Yaqoob

Waseem Yaqoob is a historian of modern political thought specialising in the history of ideas about politics, economics and international order in the twentieth century, also interested in ideas of solidarity, and the history of military occupation and civilian resistance in South Asia, in particular Kashmir, where his family is from. Waseem Yaqoob serves as co-director for the intercollegiate MA in the History of Political Thought and Intellectual History offered jointly by UCL and QMUL. His first book entitled ‘History and Judgment: The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt’, is under review with Princeton University Press. He is now working on a project reinterpreting the history of political thought of twentieth-century Germany in an international and global context.
Prior to joining Queen Mary in 2019 Waseem Yaqoob was a Lecturer in Modern Political Thought at the University of Cambridge, Research Fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge and a DAAD Visiting Fellow at Humboldt University.

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