Current students

David Klemperer

David is researching the history of socialist political thought in France, under the supervision of Professors Julian Jackson and Iain Stewart. Entitled “The Ideological Crisis of French Socialism, c.1930 – c.1950”, his PhD project explores how thinkers within France’s Socialist Party responded to the challenges posed by fascism, communism, war, economic crisis, and the realities of holding power. David previously completed an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge, and a BA in History and Politics at the University of Oxford. Alongside his project, he has wider interests in political theory, and in the history of social democracy.

 

Kajo Kubala

After completing his BA in History at the University of Cambridge, Kajo went on to pursue an MA in the History of Political Thought and Intellectual History at Queen Mary, University of London, where he is now a PhD candidate. Kajo’s interests include Thomas Hobbes, early American history, Atlantic history, and early modern political thought. His PhD project focuses on the corporate origins of the modern state and the role that corporations had in the process of state-formation.

 

Iacovos Iacovides

Iacovos works on early modern political thought. He studies the first texts to introduce economic and commercial development as part and parcel of politics, with a particular focus on the writings of the Italian Jesuit Giovanni Botero. His broader objective is to examine the implications of these ideas upon early imperial expansion and the state. His project is supervised by Professor Andrew Fitzmaurice. Iacovos holds a BSc in Economics and Politics from QMUL and an MSc in Political Sociology from the LSE. Before starting his PhD, he completed the MA in the History of Political Thought and Intellectual History at QMUL and UCL.

 

Cathleen Mair

Cathleen works on late eighteenth-century debates about the place of passions, sentiments and affections in political life, under the supervision of Professors Thomas Dixon and Gareth Stedman Jones. Her LAHP-funded project focuses on the thought and networks of Mary Wollstonecraft and Germaine de Staël. It traces the religious, philosophical and literary sources of their ideas about emotion, and examines to what extent their understanding of the relationship between politics and feeling shifted during the revolutionary period. Cathleen holds an MA in the History of Political Thought and Intellectual History from Queen Mary and University College London and a BA (Hons) from UCL.

 

Charlotte McCallum

Following a BA in English and Related Literature from the University of York and an MA in Early Modern Studies from UCL, Charlotte is currently undertaking a PhD at QMUL on the translation, publication and reception of Machiavelli’s works in seventeenth-century England. Working between the History and English departments, under the supervision of Professors Quentin Skinner and Warren Boutcher, her work crosses the boundaries between translation studies, the history of the book and the history of political thought.

 

Tom Musgrove

Tom is researching perceptions of the Balkans in Britain and Ireland between 1856 and 1914, under the supervision of Professors Georgios Varouxakis and Martyn Frampton. His project aims to examine the changing conceptions of modernity, progress, and the ‘West’ throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with discussions of the Balkans as a region notionally caught between historical eras and between continents serving as an important arena through which political writers could explore such questions. He holds a BA in History and an MPhil in World History from the University of Cambridge.

 

Atlanta Neudorf

Atlanta NeudorfAtlanta Neudorf researches the revolutionary political thought of French exiles in London between the 1848 revolutions and the Paris Commune with a particular focus on the writings, activism, and networks of Félix Pyat (1810-1889). Her research is supervised by Professors Georgios Varouxakis, Maurizio Isabella, and Gareth Stedman Jones and is funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Atlanta holds an MPhil in Modern European History from the University of Cambridge and a BA from Durham University.

 

Susannah Owen

Susannah is researching the Jacobin Club of Paris in the French Revolution, under the supervision of Professor Colin Jones and Professor Miles Ogborn, and supported by Dr Hannah Williams. Using digital methodologies such as GIS and distant reading, her research explores questions surrounding the relationship between the Jacobins and the city space of Paris, the discourse of Jacobinism, and the social makeup of the Paris club. Her MRes dissertation, carried out at Keele University, investigated the use of urban space to shape citizens in France’s interwar garden cities movement. It used the case study of Suresnes – a suburb of Paris – to explore the political and ideological motives of a network of garden city planners and architects working around the capital at this time.

 

Tanroop Sandhu

Tanroop Sandhu is a PhD candidate studying the political thought of South Asian leftists in the diaspora during the interwar period, under the supervision of Dr Chris Moffat and Professor Martyn Frampton. His research seeks to analyze the contributions that figures like Rajani Palme Dutt and Shapurji Saklatvala, among others, made to communist theory and anti-imperialist politics in both India and the imperial core. Tanroop completed his BA in History, and his MA in the Tri-University History Program, at the University of Waterloo. His other research interests include, broadly, the histories of anti-colonialism, communism, and the Indian independence movement.

 

Former students 

 

Callum Barrell

callum_menu-thumbCallum took his BA and MPhil at Cambridge, where he worked under Paul Cartledge and Michael Ledger-Lomas on J.S. Mill’s philosophy of history.  His PhD research explored the connection between the philosophy of history, spontaneity, and political obligation in classical utilitarian thought. His aim is to prove that their political speculations rested on a comprehensive theory of causality, history, and historical change. He was supervised by Professors Gareth Stedman Jones and Georgios Varouxakis. His broader interests include representations of ‘pure democracy’ in Western thought from Aristotle to J.S. Mill; the concept of ‘presentism’; and the social doctrines of Auguste Comte.

 

Conor Bollins

14088713_10201821326972294_1344642536_nConor graduated from the University of Sussex in 2013 with a BA in English Literature & History. In 2016, he completed his MPhil in Political Thought & Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge. Under the supervision of Professor Richard Bourke and Professor Gareth Stedman Jones, he analysed eighteenth-century discussions of rural depopulation in relation to theories of political and economic stability. Conor has broader interests in political economy, Enlightenment philosophy, the politics of the French Revolution and the history of democracy.

 

Victoria Briggs

Victoria Briggs_menu-thumbVictoria was a research student at the School of Politics and IR, Queen Mary University of London. Her research covers contemporary continental political theory and philosophy, democratic conflict theory and post-Marxist political theory. Her work focuses on questions of democracy, civil disobedience and compliance, autonomy and politics of the exception, and she has drawn on ideas in contemporary thought in order to prompt a re-engagement with a key democratic paradox via the political and philosophical thought of Cornelius Castoriadis. Other research interests include Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Hannah Arendt, Carl Schmitt, Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Rancière, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe.

 

Alexandra Chadwick

Alexandra Chadwick photo (1)_menu-thumbAlexandra graduated from King’s College, Cambridge in 2006 with a degree in Social and Political Sciences, and holds an MA in Political Philosophy from the University of York. She worked under the supervision of Professor Quentin Skinner on Thomas Hobbes’s understanding of the ‘powers of the mind’, and how this influences his natural and political philosophy.

 

George Currie

George was a graduate student in the Department of Politics and International Relations at QMUL.  His main research interests focus on the work of three thinkers:  Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Carlyle.  Primarily, George looks at how the thought of these three thinkers was related in the complex political and intellectual circumstances of the early nineteenth century.  Other research interests include Basil Hall and Herbert Spencer.

 

Seamus Flaherty

Seamus worked under the supervision of Professor Gareth Stedman Jones on the political thought emanating from two of the three principal organisations formed during the first decade of the ‘socialist revival’ in late-nineteenth century Britain: the Social Democratic Federation and the Socialist League. To be still even more exact, he will attempt to recover the political thought enunciated by three leading socialists: H. M. Hyndman, Ernest Belfort Bax, and William Morris. His wider research interests include socialist and anarchist thought in general, as well as questions concerning the nature of interpretation and historical explanation. Seamus completed both his BA in History and MA in the History of Political Thought and Intellectual History at Queen Mary.

 

Georgios Giannakopoulos

Georgios_menu-thumbGeorge holds a BA and an MA in Political Science and History from Panteion University, Athens (Greece). He worked under the supervision of Professor Georgios Varouxakis on British international thought in the time of the Great War and its aftermath.

 

Giuseppe Grieco

Giuseppe Grieco is a PhD candidate in History of Political Thought at Queen Mary University of London. He holds a BA and MA in History from Scuola Normale Superiore and the University of Pisa. His research interests lie in the fields of intellectual, imperial and global history, particularly the Mediterranean, the British empire and the history of international law in the long nineteenth century.

 

Signy Gutnick Allen

Signy worked on sixteenth and seventeenth-century English understandings of crime and punishment while at QMUL.  She is especially interested in the work of Thomas Hobbes and the philosophical justifications of the state’s right to punish, as well as broader questions surrounding the classification of treason and portrayals of criminality. She holds a BA in Modern History and Literature from Balliol College, Oxford (2010) and an MA in the History of Political Thought from Queen Mary and University College London (2012).

 

Adela Halo

Adela Halo is currently a Teaching Fellow in the History of Political Thought at UCL. Adela was a research student between the schools of Law and History at Queen Mary, examining constitutional debates during the Directory period of the French Revolution, under the supervision of Professor Gareth Stedman Jones and Dr Maksymilian Del Mar. Her thesis, entitled ‘Ending the French Revolution: Madame de Staël and the Birth of Liberalism in France’, explores the constitutional thought of Germaine de Staël, and in particular her ideas on the legislative and executive powers, representative government as an “aristocratie des meilleurs”, public opinion, and the role of religion in buttressing republican institutions. Previously, Adela completed the MA in History of Political Thought and Intellectual History at Queen Mary and University College London (2014).

 

Catherine Hulse

Catherine HulseCatherine worked on an analysis of the ideology of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in particular of the notion of popular sovereignty, and how this shaped the political and legal thought and practise of the 1794-99 period of the French Revolution. She was supervised by Professors Richard Bourke and Gareth Stedman Jones, and supported by Professor Colin Jones. Other research interests include the ideology of Robespierre, and the ideas of liberty and democracy more broadly in the 18th century.

 

Elliott Karstadt

Elliott Karstadt_menu-thumbElliott completed a BA in History in Cambridge before taking the MA in the History of Political Thought and Intellectual History at Queen Mary, and was awarded his PhD in June 2013. Under the supervision of Professor Quentin Skinner, his research focused on the concept of private interests and their relationship to the common good, as discussed by political and moral theorists in early-modern England. Elliott has taught political thought at Queen Mary, UCL and Cambridge, and he was the first recipient of the Hobbes Studies Essay Prize in 2016. Until June 2015 Elliott was editor in History books for Polity Press in Cambridge, and he is now a student rabbi at Leo Baeck College in London.

 

Vanessa Lim

Vanessa holds a BSc in Politics and Philosophy from the London School of Economics and Political Science and the intercollegiate MA in the History of Political Thought and Intellectual History. She was jointly supervised by Professors Quentin Skinner and David Colclough between the Schools of History and English. Her research interests sit at the intersection of literary, cultural and intellectual history, as well as the history of early modern political thought. Her PhD thesis explored Shakespeare’s uses of deliberative rhetoric.

 

Julia Nicholls

Julia_menu-thumbJulia worked under the supervision of Professor Gareth Stedman Jones on her thesis titled ‘French Revolutionary Thought after the Paris Commune, 1871-1885’, which explores a range of subjects including republicanism, laïcité, imperialism, and the increasing prominence of Marxism between 1871 and 1885.  Her research interests include revolutionary and radical political and ethical thought in Third Republic France and twentieth-century South Asia.  She is particularly interested in transnational encounters and the global circulation of ideas.  From October 2016, Julia will be Lecturer in modern European history at New College, Oxford. She has published with The Historical Journal and is currently adapting her thesis into a monograph. Julia also holds a BA in History and an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies from King’s College, Cambridge.

 

Joanne Paul

J-Paul3_menu-thumbJoanne is currently Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Sussex, where she is also Joint Director of the Centre for Intellectual History. She completed her PhD on “Counsel and Command in Anglophone Political Thought, 1485-1651” under the supervision of Quentin Skinner at Queen Mary, University of London, where she was Graduate Liaison for the Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought. The proposal for a revised and expanded version of this doctoral work has been accepted for publication with Cambridge University Press. She has published her research into Renaissance and Early Modern intellectual history widely, with work appearing in Hobbes Studies, Renaissance Quarterly, Renaissance Studies and Notes & Queries, and her first monograph – on the thought and work of Thomas More – is published with Polity in October 2016.

 

Lorenzo Sabbadini

sabbadini_menu-thumbLorenzo is an independent researcher working on early-modern English political thought. He completed his PhD in 2013, under the supervision of Professor Quentin Skinner. He holds a BA in History from Oxford and an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History from Cambridge.

 

Evangelos Sakkas

Evangelos Sakkas_menu-thumbEvangelos worked on the British debate on the American Revolution under the supervision of Professors Richard Bourke and Quentin Skinner. His research interests include Rational Dissent, republicanism, the reception of classical texts in early modern Europe and eighteenth-century English political thought. He previously studied History and Archaeology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and completed the intercollegiate MA in the History of Political Thought and Intellectual History.

 

Richard Smittenaar

smittenaar_menu-thumbRichard worked under the supervision of Professor Georgios Varouxakis. His PhD thesis is concerned with conservatism and international political thought in Victorian Britain. Richard holds a BA in Philosophy from Radboud University Nijmegen (NL), an MA in International Relations from Westminster University; and an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History from Christ’s College, Cambridge.