Lectures in Intellectual History

Christopher de Bellaigue - "Suleyman the Magnificent and the 16th-century race for empire"

This lecture was delivered at the University of St Andrews on 31 January 2024. 

Ariane Fichtl - “Overcoming the biopolitical dynamic of enslavement to achieve Immediate Emancipation”

This lecture was delivered at the University of St Andrews on 24 January 2024. 

Tim Stuart-Buttle - "Behind the Curtain: Hobbes and the politics of recognition"

This lecture was delivered at the University of St Andrews on 17 January 2024. 

Richard Whatmore - "The End of Enlightenment (book launch)"

This talk was given at Toppings in St Andrews on December 7, 2023. 

Jesse Norman - "Ambition, revenge, truth, fiction - The Winding Stair"

The barely known story of the 30-year rivalry between Francis Bacon and Edward Coke is a fascinating case study in late-Elizabethan-Jacobean court politics. But it can also be a means by which to explore the limits of historical truth, and the uses of fiction. Jesse Norman is a Visiting Research Fellow at St Andrews, a Fellow of All Souls and a Member of Parliament (UK).  This lecture was given on the 17th of November 2023 at the University of St Andrews. 

Vassilios Paipais - "Between Pacifism and Just War: Oikonomia and Eastern Orthodox Political Theology"

This lecture was given at the University of St Andrews on 15 November 2023. 

Jesse Norman - Ambition, revenge, truth, fiction: The Winding Stair

The barely known story of the 30-year rivalry between Francis Bacon and Edward Coke is a fascinating case study in late-Elizabethan-Jacobean court politics. But it can also be a means by which to explore the limits of historical truth, and the uses of fiction. Dr Jesse Norman is a Visiting Research Fellow at St Andrews, a Fellow of All Souls, and a Member of Parliament (UK). 

Adam Sisman - "The Perils of Biography"

Adam Sisman in conversation with Richard Whatmore. Recorded on 8 November 2023. 

Alan Kahan - "Three Pillars and Four Fears: A History of Liberalisms

This lecture was delivered on 11 October 2023 at the University of St Andrews. 

James Harris - “Hobbes and Rousseau on ‘the act by which a people is a people’”

This lecture was delivered on 5 April 2023 at the University of St Andrews. 

Brian Young - "Utilitarianism and the universities in Victorian England: the brothers Grote in nineteenth-century thought"

This lecture was delivered at the University of St andrews on March 15, 2023. 

Sarah Mortimer - "Virtue beyond Law? Christian Ethics and Political Duties in Reformation Europe"

This lecture was delivered at the University of St Andrews on February 15, 2023. 

Ariane Fichtl - "Bound with the enslaved: the role of women in the formation of the political discourse of Immediate Abolitionism and its egalitarian framework"

This lecture was delivered at the University of St Andrews on February 1, 2023. 

Martine van Ittersum - "The Working Papers of Hugo Grotius: A Case Study in the Micro-Sociologies of Archives"

specializes in Dutch overseas expansion in the early modern period, especially its implications for political thought and practice. She is also a book historian. Her research focuses on the social history of knowledge, including the materiality of texts, the archaeology of archives, and the history of canon formation. She has taught European, Atlantic and global history at the University of Dundee since September 2003.

Interviews with Leading Intellectual Historians - Maria Rosa Antognazza

During the final weeks of the summer, the Institute of Intellectual History brings a series of new interviews with leading intellectual historians about their career and work in intellectual history.  In this sixth interview, we present a conversation with Maria Rosa Antognazza. is a professor of Philosophy at King’s College London. Her research interests include the history of philosophy, epistemology and the philosophy of religion, including the relationship between science and religion. S...

Interviews with Leading Intellectual Historians - Jamie Gianoutsos

During the final weeks of the summer, the Institute of Intellectual History brings a series of new interviews with leading intellectual historians about their career and work in intellectual history.  In this fifth interview, we present a conversation with Jamie Gianoutsos. is Associate Professor of History at Mount St. Mary’s University in the US. In the interview, Jamie shares insights into her university experience, her motivation to become a researcher and her discovery of the intellectu...

Interviews with Leading Intellectual Historians - Carole Levin

During the final weeks of the summer, the Institute of Intellectual History brings a series of new interviews with leading intellectual historians about their career and work in intellectual history.  In this fourth interview, we present a conversation with Carole Levin. Carole Levin is Willa Cather Emerita Professor of History at the University of Nebraska. She specialises in early modern English women's and cultural history. Her books include Shakespeare's Foreign Worlds: National and Trans...

Interviews with Leading Intellectual Historians – Tae-Yeoun Keum

During the final weeks of the summer, the Institute of Intellectual History brings a series of new interviews with leading intellectual historians about their career and work in intellectual history.  In this third interview, we present a conversation with Tae-Yeoun Keum.    Dr Tae-Yeoun Keum is a political theorist specialising presently in the place of myth in political thought. Her first book was on the role of symbols and myths in politics. Her first book, , examines Plato's myths and the...

Interviews with Leading Intellectual Historians - Jacqueline Broad

During the final weeks of the summer, the Institute of Intellectual History brings a series of new interviews with leading intellectual historians about their career and work in intellectual history.  In this second interview, we present a conversation with Professor Jacqueline Broad. Jaqueline Broad is Head of the Philosophy Department at Monash University. After being awarded her PhD in 2000, she won funding from the Australian Research Council 2004-2007 and 2010-2016. She is Series Editor ...

Interviews with Leading Intellectual Historians - Eileen M. Hunt

During the final weeks of the summer, the Institute of Intellectual History brings a series of new interviews with leading intellectual historians about their career and work in intellectual history.  In this first interview, we present a conversation with Eileen M. Hunt. Eileen Hunt is a professor of political science and a political theorist whose scholarly interests cover modern political thought, feminism, the family, rights, ethics of technology, and philosophy and literature, from femin...

Emma McLeod - "John Bruce, precedent, and the 'mind of government' in the English and Scottish state trials of 1793-94"

This lecture was given at the University of St Andrews on April 20, 2022. 

Rosa Antognazza - Leibniz as Historian

This lecture was given at the University of St Andrews on April 13, 2022. 

Karie Schultz - Holy war advocates or secular political theorists? The case of the Scottish Covenanters, 1638-1646

This lecture was given at the University of St Andrews on April 6, 2022. 

Craig Smith - Adam Smith and the Limits of Philosophy

This lecture was delivered at the University of St Andrews on 23 March 2022 and subsequently at George Mason University, where it was recorded. For a video of this lecture with the powerpoint slides, please vist:  

Jesse Norman - Uses and abuses of the Ancient Constitution

This lecture was delivered at the University of St Andrews on 1 April 2022. 

Ryan Hanley - Commerce before Capitalism: Fénelon, Vauban, and Boisguilbert

This lecture was given on 16 February 2022 at the University of St Andrews. Ryan Patrick Hanley is Professor of Political Science at Boston College. His most recent projects include The Political Philosophy of Fénelon, and a companion translation volume, Fénelon: Moral and Political Writings, both of which was published by Oxford University Press in 2020.

Special Edition: Interview with Will Sellinger

Will Selinger is Lecturer in European History, 1700-1850 at University College London. His 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, was published by Cambridge University Press. Dr Paul Sagar interviewed Will Sellinger about the book in May, 2020. 

Special Edition: Interview with Mark Towsey

Mark Towsey is Professor of the History of the Book at the University of Liverpool. His most recent book is Reading History in Britain and America, c. 1750-1840 (Cambridge). In April 2020, Dr Max Skjönsberg interviewed Professor Towsey about the book.

Special Edition: Interview with James Hankins

James Hankins is Professor of History at Harvard University and founder and General Editor of the . He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy and Renaissance Civic Humanism and is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading authorities on humanist political thought. His most recent book is Virtue Politics - Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy (Harvard, 2019). He was interviewed by Dr Danielle Charette in April, 2020. 

Special Edition: Interview with Joanne Paul

Dr Joanne Paul is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Sussex. Her most recent book is Council and Command in Early Modern English Thought (CUP), which was published in the prestigious Ideas in Context series.  Professor Iain McDaniel from the University of Sussex interviewed her about the book in April, 2020.     

John Robertson - The Refutation of Natural Law by Sacred History in Giambattista Vico's New Science

Professor John Robertson (Cambridge & St Andrews) delivered this lecture at the University of St Andrews on February 27, 2020. The event was organised by the Institute of Legal and Constitutional Research in collaboration with the Institute of Intellectual History.

Special Edition: Interview with Colin Kidd

Colin Kidd is Professor of History at the University of St Andrews. This interview focusses on his book The World of Mr Casaubon - Britain's Wars of Mythography, 1700-1870 (Cambridge, 2016). 

Special Edition: Interview with Michael Sonenscher

Michael Sonenscher is Fellow in History at King's College Cambridge. In this interview he is talking about his most recent work entitled Jean-Jacques Rousseau - The Division of Labour, the Politics of the Imagination and the Concept of Federal Government (Brill, 2020).  

Giulia Delogu - The Emporium of Words: Free Ports and Port Cities as Laboratories of Modernity (16th-19th centuries)

Dr Giulia Delogu (Venice) delivered this lecture on February 5th 2020.   

Thomas Maissen - Britannia and her sisters in the 16th and 17th centuries: Political Representation and Iconography

Professor Thomas Maissen (Heidelberg/Paris) delivered this lecture on January 28, 2020 at the University of St Andrews.

Ian MacLean - Old wine in new bottles? Hippocrates, the classical tradition and the Early Enlightenment

Professor Ian MacLean (Oxford/St Andrews) delivered this lecture at the Institute of Intellectual History on November 19th 2019. 

David Weinstein - Green's Hume

Professor David Weinstein (Wake Forest) delivered this lecture on November 12, 2019 at the University of St Andrews. 

Lucia Rubinelli - Sovereignty and Constituent Power in Weimar Germany”

Dr Lucia Rubinelli (Cambridge) delivered the 18th István Hont Memorial Lecture on October 29 2019 at the University of St Andrews "This paper is the third chapter of a book manuscript, titled Constituent power: A history. The book mainly focuses on how Sieyes’ first theorisation of pouvoir constituant has been used and misused by subsequent theorists, including Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt. In this chapter, I argue that Schmitt theorised constituent power as the democratic embodiment of sov...

Lucia Rubinelli - Sovereignty and Constituent Power in Weimar Germany

Dr Lucia Rubinelli (Cambridge) delivered the 18th István Hont Memorial Lecture on October 29 2019 at the University of St Andrews "This paper is the third chapter of a book manuscript, titled Constituent power: A history. The book mainly focuses on how Sieyes’ first theorisation of pouvoir constituant has been used and misused by subsequent theorists, including Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt. In this chapter, I argue that Schmitt theorised constituent power as the democratic embodiment of sov...

James Poskett - Materials of the Mind: Phrenology, Race, and the Global History of Science, 1815-1920

Dr James Poskett (Warwick) delivered this lecture on October 15th 2019 at the University of St Andrews. Phrenology was the most popular mental science of the Victorian age. From American senators to Indian social reformers, this new mental science found supporters around the globe. James’s new book, Materials of the Mind, tells the story of how phrenology changed the world—and how the world changed phrenology. It is a story of skulls from the Arctic, plaster casts from Haiti, books from Benga...

Emma Hunter - Africa and the Global History of Liberalism

Dr Emma Hunter (Edinburgh) delivered this lecture at the University of St Andrews on September 24, 2019. 

Silvia Sebastiani - The Boundaries of Humanity in the Enlightenment: Orangutans, Slaves and Global Markets.

Dr Silvia Sebastiani (EHESS) delivered the 10th James H. Burnes Memorial Lecture on April 23, 2019 at the Institute of Intellectual History. 

Richard Whatmore - The End of Enlightenment: A synopsis of the 2019 Carlyle Lectures

Richard Whatmore - The End of Enlightenment: A synopsis of the 2019 Carlyle Lectures

Richard Whatmore (St Andrews) delivered this talk at the University of St Andrews on April 3, 2019. The talk was based on the Carlyle Lectures, which Professor Whatmore gave at the University of Oxford in the spring semester of 2019. 

Iain McDaniel - Writing the Intellectual History of Caesarism in the era of the Franco-Prussian War

Dr Iain McDaniel (Sussex) delivered the 16th István Hont Memorial Lecture at the Institute of Intellectual History (St Andrews) on April 2, 2019. 

Iain McDaniel - Writing the Inteellectual History of Caesarism in the era of the Franco-Prussian War

Nathan Alexander - The Meanings of "Racism": Towards a history of the concept

Dr Nathan Alexander (Erfurt) delivered this talk at the University of St Andrews on February 2, 2019. 

Robin Douglass - The Moral Psychology of the Social Contract

Alex Douglas - Spinoza and Religion

Dr Alex Douglas is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of St Andrews. 

Paul Wood - The Rise and Fall of the Common Sense 'School' of Philosophy

The emergence of a Scottish 'school' of common sense philosophy has not yet been given the historical attention it deserves, despite the fact  that the rise of common sense philosophy was one of the most important intellectual developments in the Atlantic world during the second half of the 18th century. In this lecture, Professor Paul Wood examines the responses of common sense philosophers such as James Beattie, James Oswald and Thomas Reid to David Hume's perceived scepticism and irreligio...