The Centre for the Study ofthe History of Political Thought

Events

Past Events

Rethinking Liberty: a colloquium and reception

Friday 20th May, 2022

14:00 - 18:00, Bush House, King’s College London

An in-person colloquium at King’s College London to reflect on different ways of thinking about liberty. The colloquium will be followed by a reception to celebrate the work of Quentin Skinner and to mark the publication of Rethinking Liberty before Liberalism, edited by Hannah Dawson and Annelien de Dijn (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

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Book symposium: Andrew Fitzmaurice’s ‘King Leopold’s Ghostwriter’

Friday 13th May, 2022

16:00 – 19:00, Room GC201, Graduate Centre, Queen Mary University of London

The Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought and the Schools of Law and History at Queen Mary University of London are delighted to co-host a New Book Symposium on Professor Andrew Fitzmaurice’sKing Leopold’s Ghostwriter: The Creation of Persons and States in the Nineteenth Century‘ (Princeton University Press, 2022).

The event is organised by Professor Maksymilian Del Mar (QMUL) and Professor Georgios Varouxakis (QMUL).

Speakers:
Professor David Armitage (Harvard)
Professor Michael Lobban (LSE)
Professor Lisa Siraganian (Johns Hopkins)
Dr. Inge Van Hulle (Max Planck, Frankfurt)
Professor Andrew Fitzmaurice (QMUL)

Chaired by Professor Quentin Skinner (QMUL) and Professor Maksymilian Del Mar (QMUL).

Date & Time: Friday 13 May 2022, 16.00 – 19.00, followed by a reception in the Arts Two SCR.
Venue: Room GC201, Graduate Centre, Queen Mary University of London

Booking is essential. To book, please click here.

Book launch: Caroline Ashcroft’s ‘Violence and Power in the Thought of Hannah Arendt’

Tuesday 22nd March, 2022

17:15–18:30, 1.12 Laws Building, Queen Mary University of London

Queen Mary’s Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought and School of History are delighted to host the launch of Dr Caroline Ashcroft’s (QMUL) ‘Violence and Power in the Thought of Hannah Arendt’ (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). The event is organised by Dr Waseem Yaqoob (QMUL).

Speakers:
Dr Caroline Ashcroft (QMUL)
Professor Kimberley Hutchings (QMUL)
Dr Andrew Schaap (Exeter)
Dr Waseem Yaqoob (QMUL)

Chaired by Professor Andrew Fitzmaurice (QMUL).

Time: Tuesday 22 March 2022, 17.15 – 18.30, followed by a reception in the Senior Common Room

Venue: 1.12 Laws Building, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London, E1 4NS

Please register to attend here.

12th Annual London Graduate Conference in HPT

Thursday 24th June, 2021 – Friday 25th June, 2021

10:00 – 18:30, Virtual

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2019 Rubinstein Lecture: Professor Melissa Lane

Thursday 21st March, 2019

18:30 – 21:00, ArtsTwo Lecture Theatre, Queen Mary University of London

We are pleased to announce the details of the 2019 Annual Rubinstein Lecture:

ChairProfessor Quentin Skinner, Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities, QMUL

SpeakerProfessor Melissa Lane, Class of 1943 Professor of Politics & Director, University Center for Human Values, Princeton University

Title‘Lycurgus, Solon, Charondas…: Figuring the legislator in Platonic political thought and its aftermath’

To be followed by a reception. Please register here.

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2018 Annual Symposium in the Humanities and Social Sciences on Quentin Skinner’s From Humanism to Hobbes

Friday 23rd November, 2018

13:30 – 19:30, Senate Room, Senate House, University of London, Malet St, WC1E 7HU

Please join us for the 2018 Queen Mary Annual Symposium in the Humanities and Social Sciences. This year will be dedicated to Professor Quentin Skinner’s book From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Registration is essential.

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Ideas of Poverty in the Age of Enlightenment

Wednesday 5th September, 2018 – Thursday 6th September, 2018

Strand Campus, King’s College London

Although the Age of Enlightenment saw the development of radically new approaches to comprehending and reforming society and politics, our current understanding is that the existence of poverty was rarely problematized by eighteenth-century thinkers, writers and officials – notwithstanding that ‘the poor’ made up the clear majority of Europe’s population. This picture only changed in the transformative decade of the 1790s. This conference brings together historians with a wide range of geographical and theoretical expertise to re-examine the ways in which poverty was conceptualised in the social, political and religious discourses of eighteenth-century Europe.

The conference is generously supported by the King’s College London Faculty of Humanities Research Grant Programme, Dept. of History Research Fund and Centre for Enlightenment Studies; University College London’s History Dept. Events Fund; and the Royal Historical Society.

Those wishing to attend are requested to register by emailing Niall O’Flaherty (niall.o’flaherty@kcl.ac.uk) and Robin Mills (robin.mills@ucl.ac.uk) by 31 August. Places are limited and will be offered on a rolling basis. Please click here to download a copy of the conference programme.

Manuscript Workshop on Professor Annelien de Dijn’s Freedom: An Unruly History

Monday 3rd September, 2018

10:30 - 17:30, Strand Campus, King’s College London

Call for Participation: Manuscript Workshop on Professor Annelien de Dijn (University of Utrecht), Freedom: An Unruly History (Harvard University Press, forthcoming).

The Centre for Enlightenment Studies at King’s College London, with support from the Leverhulme Trust, is proud to host a manuscript workshop on Professor de Dijn’s forthcoming intellectual history Freedom: An Unruly History. This will take the form of five hour-long chapter-by-chapter sessions opened by commentators followed by general discussion.

For expressions of interest in attending or for further details please contact robin.mills@ucl.ac.uk. Places are limited so email asap. Participation at this event involves committing to reading as much of the manuscript as possible and attending with the intention to contribute to discussion if possible. Refreshments will be provided and there will be a subsidised dinner for attendees.

Commentators: David Carter (Reading), Valentina Arena (UCL)/Justin Champion (Royal Holloway), Angus Gowland (UCL), Julia Nicholls (KCL), Caroline Ashcroft (QMUL)

Symposium on the work of Martin E. Jay

Friday 15th June, 2018

We are pleased to announce the programme for the Centre’s Annual International Symposium in the Humanities and Social Sciences, which will be held on Friday, 15 June 2018. The symposium is devoted to the work of Professor Martin E. Jay (Berkeley), and registration is essential. To download the conference programme, please click here. For the conference poster, please click here.

The History of Political Thought in the Age of Ideologies, 1789-1989

Thursday 31st May, 2018 – Friday 1st June, 2018

Queen Mary University of London

Historians of political ideas since the late 1960s have advocated focussing on authorial intentions instead of tracing the progress of “unit ideas” or the transmission of disembodied concepts. Yet historical practice has not always followed methodological injunctions. Nowhere is this more the case than in the period following the French Revolution. Capacious political movements are assumed to dominate the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, giving rise to a procession of abstract ideologies. Yet is it plausible to think of the era as inhabited by such continuous “discourses”, let alone as being characterised in terms of a clash between them? This conference is intended to probe the durability of ideas that are standardly assumed to traverse the ages while sustaining the integrity of their meaning.

The conference also aims to examine how the epoch is generally presented. In what sense can the period be described as an “age of ideologies” if its constitutive doctrines are disassembled into a succession of speech-acts? In 1982 Karl Dietrich Bracher described the twentieth century as a “Zeit der Ideologien”. Yet this conception already had interesting precedents by the time he wrote, having been applied to the nineteenth century by Reinhart Koselleck in 1959. Koselleck’s depiction has a longer pedigree still, looking back to nineteenth century accounts of the legacy of the enlightenment. Thus, in the wake of the French Revolution, the idea emerged that an era of hostile ideologies had succeeded an older age of religious strife. In exploring how we might best write the history of political thought after 1789, this conference will examine common depictions of the period as living in the shadow of revolutionary upheaval that unleashed an enduring contest between opposing principles.

The speakers at the conference include Peter Ghosh (Oxford), Niklas Oslen (Copenhagen), Greg Conti (Cambridge), Gareth Stedman Jones (QMUL), Emily Jones (Cambridge), Jennifer Pitts (Chicago), William Selinger (Harvard), Maurizio Isabella (QMUL), Stuart Jones (Manchester), Andrew Sartori (NYU), Eva Hausteiner (Bonn), Leslie Butler (Dartmouth), Georgios Varouxakis (QMUL), Duncan Kelly (Cambridge), Anne-Sophie Chambost (Université Jean Monnet Saint-Etienne), Rachel Hoffman (Cambridge), Quentin Skinner (QMUL), Udi Greenberg (Dartmouth), Julia Nicholls (KCL), and Richard Bourke (QMUL).

Registration for this event is essential. To download the conference programme, please click here.