The London Graduate Conference in the History of Political Thought will be held on 30th June-1st July, on the theme of ‘Imagined Worlds’. The Keynote speaker is Melissa Lane.
To view the programme, click here.
To register for the event, go to http://hptconference2016.eventbrite.com
On 13-15 June 2016, the Warburg Institute celebrated the 150th anniversary of the birth of Aby Warburg. Professor Quentin Skinner delivered a lecture titled ‘Hobbes’s Leviathan Frontispiece: Some New Observations’ at the conference commemorating the work and legacy of Aby Warburg. For recordings of the conference including Professor Skinner’s lecture, visit the website of the Warburg Institute.
In the month of May, Professor Quentin Skinner visited the University of Toruń and Jagiellonian University in Poland to deliver two public lectures. His lecture in Toruń was also accompanied by the launch of Quentin Skinner: Historical Method and Republican Liberty. The volume contains Polish translations of some of his essays, as well as discussions by Polish scholars.
The London Summer School in Intellectual History is a rare opportunity for graduate students to acquire further training in the discipline and its different methodologies. Running from 4 to 7 September 2017, the summer school will include:
Applications are welcome from doctoral students in intellectual history and related disciplines (the history of philosophy, literature, politics, and science) and from MA students intending to conduct future research in this area.
London is now one of the international centres of research and teaching in the history of political thought and intellectual history with a dedicated graduate programme and year-round research seminars, conferences, and workshops. The Summer School, now in its sixth year, is run jointly by University College London (UCL) and Queen Mary, University of London (QMUL). Keynote lectures this year will be delivered by:
The discussions will be led by members of staff from the different branches of the University of London and from overseas. In past years these have included Richard Bourke, Katrina Forrester, Gareth Stedman-Jones, and Georgios Varouxakis (QMUL), Hannah Dawson, Jeremy Jennings and Niall O’Flaherty (KCL), Michael Lobban and Lea Ypi (LSE), as well as Valentina Arena, Angus Gowland, Julian Hoppit, Axel Körner, and Avi Lifschitz (UCL). From outside the University of London, they have also included David Armitage (Harvard), Donald Winch and Iain McDaniel (Sussex), Richard Whatmore (St Andrews), Duncan Kelly (Cambridge), Felicity Green (Edinburgh) Iain Hampsher-Monk (Exeter), Martin van Gelderen (Göttingen), and Knud Haakonssen (Erfurt).
To find out what students gained from their experience at the Summer School, please see the London Summer School in Intellectual History blog.
Dates and fees: The event starts on 4 September 2017 in the evening and ends in the afternoon on 7 September 2017. It will take place at the UCL main campus in Bloomsbury. Participants are required to contribute £185, which covers tuition, lunches, and a reception on the first evening. In addition, those who would like accommodation in central London can book a room in one of the UCL Halls of Residence from £52.50 per night.
How to apply: Please send a CV and a brief abstract of current or future research to Shiru Lim at: s.lim.10@ucl.ac.uk The deadline for applications has been extended to 28 July 2017.
Professor Quentin Skinner delivered the J.H. Burns Memorial Lecture, titled ‘A Genealogy of Liberty’, on the 4th of May 2016. For a recording of the lecture, visit the website for the Institute of Intellectual History at the University of St. Andrews.
In the month of April, Professor Quentin Skinner visited Washington and Lee University in Virginia, USA to deliver two public lectures. The first lecture, titled ‘How Should We Think About Freedom’, was part of the Mudd Center’s lecture series on ‘The Ethics of Citizenship’, while the second lecture, titled ‘Why Shylock Loses His Case: Judicial Rhetoric in The Merchant of Venice‘, was part of the university’s year-long celebration of the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death in April 1616. To watch a recording of the second lecture, please click here.
Historians tend to explain the origins of modern Europe in terms of the demise of ‘the old regime’. The Enlightenment, culminating in the Age of Revolutions, is usually described as the transition between the two epochs. In this lecture, Professor Richard Bourke explores the emergence of the idea of the old regime, and asks whether it adequately captures past experience. If the period since 1750 cannot be coherently viewed in terms of progress from an ancien régime to modernity, we are left with a general question that bears on our current self-understanding: how are we to interpret the meaning of our present?
To view the flyer (pdf), click here.
To listen to a recording of the lecture, click here.
Professor Quentin Skinner delivered the keynote lecture at Virgins, Wives, Mothers: National Personifications in Early Modern Europe, a conference held at the German Historical Institute Paris at the end of March. The keynote lecture was chaired by Thomas Kirchner (Paris) with commentary by Horst Bredekamp (Berlin), and titled ‘The Leviathan Frontispiece, Meaning and Provenance’. For H-Net’s review of the conference, click here.
