Valentina Arena is a Lecturer in the Department of History at University College London. Her area of interest, broadly speaking, is Roman history, especially of the Republican period from the foundation of Rome to the principate of Augustus, with a particular emphasis on the study of politics and political concepts. More specifically, her research interests lie in the historical investigation of the concept of liberty in the Roman Republican world. She is currently finishing a book entitled Libertas and the Practice of Politics in the Late Roman Republic, which investigates the interplay between democratic concepts and actual ‘conservative’ policies in the first century BC.

Valentina Arena will be contributing her knowledge of first-century BC republican ideology, especially Cicero’s definition of the state as a ‘res populi’ and his intricate conception of the ‘people’.

Richard Bourke is Professor in the History of Political Thought in the School of History at Queen Mary, University of London. He has previously published in political, intellectual and literary history, focussing on Enlightenment political thought and Romanticism, as well as on modern Irish history. He also has a longstanding interest in ancient political thought, particularly in Greek political argument in the fourth and fifth centuries BC. He co-edited Political Judgementwith Raymond Geuss (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and a second edition of his Peace in Ireland: The War of Ideas will appeared in 2012. Much of his research has focussed on the political thought of Edmund Burke, including on ideas of empire, conquest, sovereignty and sociability. The theme of popular sovereignty has been central his work.

Richard Bourke is co-directing the network on popular sovereignty with Quentin Skinner. His contribution to the project will focus on ideas of popular sovereignty in the eighteenth century, particularly on arguments about popular consent and popular representation, culminating in the controversies surrounding the French revolution. He will also be co-editing the collaborative volume which will arise out of the proceedings of the network.

Alan Cromartie has an interest in all aspects of the History of Political Thought and the Philosophy of History, but specialises in the development of English thinking from the mid-fifteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries. He is the author of Sir Matthew Hale: law, politics and religion (Cambridge University Press 1995) and the editor of Thomas Hobbes, A dialogue between a philosopher and a student, of the common laws of England (Oxford University Press 2005). His other writings treat the works of James Harrington, Richard Hooker, and the causes of the English Revolution

Alan Cromartie will be examining the impact of analysis of both foreign policy and local constitutional arrangements in terms of ‘interest’ on inherited ideas about ‘representation’ during the English Civil War. This kind of analysis formed a bridge between community sovereignty and definitely popular sovereignty, and between the republican ideal of a mixed constitution and the utilitarian case for ‘representative democracy’, influencing both Harrington and Spinoza (and even, in a deviant fashion, Hobbes).

Serena Ferente is lecturer in Medieval European History at King’s College London. She has worked on the political and social history of late medieval Italy, particularly partisanship in political practice and political thought. Her current research focuses on passion in late medieval political and juridical languages. She is also writing on the intersections of gender and the history of sovereignty in late medieval jurisprudence.

Serena Ferente will bring to the network her specialised knowledge of the political ideologies of the city-states, and form a link between our concern with the thought of both the classical and post-classical worlds by relating the thought of Marsilius of Padua at once to Roman traditions of jurisprudence and the constitutional realities of contemporary Italian politics.

Kinch Hoekstra is Assistant Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He specialises in the history of political, moral, and legal philosophy and has written on ancient, renaissance, and early modern political thought. In particular, he has published a number of studies on aspects of the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, including legal obligation, democracy, tyranny, mixed government, natural law, and the rationality of justice. He has recently published on Thucydides and the sources of modern political theory and Hobbes’s theories of the natural condition and democracy.

Kinch Hoekstra will bring to the network his expertise in fifth-century BC understandings of the democratic tyrant, especially Thucydides’History of the Peloponnesian War.

Duncan Kelly is a Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Cambridge. He has a particular interest in theories of politics and the state found in nineteenth and twentieth century European political thought, especially that of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Franz Neumann. His recent publications include an edited volume: Lineages of Empire: the Historical Roots of British Imperial Thought (Oxford, 2009) and The Propriety of Liberty: Persons, Passions and Judgement in Modern Political Thought(Princeton, 2010).

Duncan Kelly’s contribution will examine the novel and synthetic theory of the modern state presented by Johann Caspar Bluntschli, anchored in the latter’s particular response to the popular revolutions of 1830 and 1848.

Melissa Lane is Professor of Politics at Princeton University. Her work focuses primarily on ancient Greek political thought, in particular the philosophy of Plato, but she has also worked extensively on the modern reception of the ancients and indeed their modern significance. Her most recent book is Eco-Republic(published in 2011 in the UK by Peter Lang and in 2012 in the US by Princeton University Press), which draws on ancient Greek political thought as a model for thinking about the psycho-social dynamics of sustainability. She also published in 2011 a coedited volume with Martin A. Ruehl, A Poet’s Reich: Culture and Politics in the George Circle (Camden House), which includes her reassessment of the Circle’s readings of Plato. She is the author of the article on ‘Ancient Political Philosophy’ in the prestigious onlineStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Current work includes a study of the rule of knowledge in Plato and a project on the figure of the founder-legislator in the history of political thought.

Melissa Lane’s contribution to the network will focus on the topic of ‘offices’ (archai) in Athens, which was crucial both to the functioning of Athenian democracy and to the ways in which Plato and Aristotle reflected upon it and developed their own political thought. Professor Lane will be presenting her paper – ‘Rethinking Offices: Athenians, Plato, and Aristotle on Popular magistracies and Political Knowledge – at the first meeting of the network on the 6th of July, 2012.

Karuna Mantena is Associate Professor of Political Science at Yale University. Her research interests include modern political thought, modern social theory, the intellectual history of empire, the theory and history of imperialism, South Asian politics and history, and theories of race and culture. Her current research focuses on political realism and the political theory of M.K. Gandhi. She has recently published Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton, 2010) and contributed a chapter on the work of Hannah Arendt to a volume entitled Politics in Dark Times: Encounters with Hannah Arendt, edited Seyla Benhabib, Roy T. Tsao, and Peter Verovsek (Cambridge, 2010).

Kauruna Mantena will bring to the network her understanding of the impact of de- colonialisation on India from the late nineteenth century down to 1947 and her knowledge of imperial and anti-imperial thought from Henry Maine to Mohandas Gandhi.

Eric Nelson is Professor of Government at Harvard University. His research focuses on the history of political thought in early-modern Europe and America, and on the implications of that history for debates in contemporary political theory. Particular interests include the history of republican political theory, the reception of classical political thought in early-modern Europe, theories of property, and the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. Nelson is the author of The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Harvard/Belknap, 2010) and The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2004), as well as editor of Hobbes’s translations of the Iliadand Odyssey for the Clarendon Edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes (The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2008).

Eric Nelson’s work with the network will focus on the persistence of ideas of prerogative authority in the American colonies in the 1770s, underlining the starkness of the shift to a fully-fledged republican ideology after 1776, and continuing into an investigation of Federalist constitutionalism in the 1780s and 1790s. He will be presenting his paper – ‘”The King is the Only Sovereign of the Empire”: Prerogative, Representation, and the American Founding’ – at the first meeting of the network on the 6th of July 2012.

Quentin Skinner is Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities at in the School of History at Queen Mary, University of London. The focus of his work is on early-modern European intellectual history, and he has published recently on the themes of Renaissance rhetorical culture, republicanism, and the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. He has written on a variety of topics in historical methodology and political philosophy, including work on the concepts of liberty and the State. His work has also touched on the concept of Sovereignty, and he recently co-edited Sovereignty in Fragments: The Past, Present and Future of a Contested Concept with Hent Kalmo (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Quentin Skinner is serving as co-director to the Popular Sovereignty Project with Richard Bourke and will be co-editing the collaborate volume produced at the conclusion of the project, as well as chairing many of the sessions. He will bring to the network a broad expertise in the history of ideas of sovereignty extending from the late Middle Ages, but he will also bring the specific concerns of recent research into the legacy of neo- Roman ideas of the people’s liberty, extending from the 1640s to the eve of the American Revolution.

Timothy Stanton is a Lecturer at the University of York. His work focuses on the thought of John Locke and its relation to the thought of Thomas Hobbes, Nonconformity in seventeenth-century England, toleration and liberalism. He has recently published on these topics with Political Theory and Locke Studies as well as contributing to volumes such as The Continuum Companion to Locke (Continuum, 2010) and The Sage Encyclopedia of Political Theory (Sage, 2010). He is currently completing a critical edition of the Locke-Stillingfleet controversy over toleration and separation from the Church of England, 1680-1683 and is contributing to the volume Freedom and the Construction of Europe edited by Quentin Skinner and Martin van Gelderen.

Timothy Stanton will be contributing his knowledge of the collision between Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt over the limits to liberalism prescribed by the commitment to popular sovereignty, with special attention to the debts owed by the twentieth-century German debate to seventeenth-century natural lawyers, demonstrating the long shadow cast by Hobbes and Locke over subsequent controversies over the rule of law. He will be presenting his paper – ‘State Authority, Popular Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law: Weber, Schmitt, Kelsen, and the lessons of Weimar Germany’ at the first meeting of the network on the 6th of July 2012.

Richard Tuck is the Frank G. Thomson Professor of Government in the Department of Government at Harvard University. His works address a variety of topics including political authority, human rights, natural law, and toleration, and focus on a number of thinkers including Hobbes, Grotius, Selden, and Descartes. His current work deals with political thought and international law, and traces the history of thought about international politics from Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf, Locke, and Vattel, to Kant. He is also engaged in a work on the origins of twentieth century economic thought. His most well-known works include His works includeNatural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development(Cambridge, 1979), Hobbes: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 1989), and Philosophy and Government, 1572-1651 (Cambridge, 1993).

Richard Tuck will bring to the network his interest in the idea of the ‘sleeping sovereign’ from Bodin to Siéyes, thus enabling him to contribute a perspective that spans the whole of the early modern period.