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. 

Lectures in Intellectual History

Special Edition: Interview with Will Sellinger

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 Mark Towsey

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 James Hankins

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.     

Special Edition: Interview with Joanne Paul

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.

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

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 Colin Kidd

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).  

Special Edition: Interview with Michael Sonenscher

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Weinstein - Green's Hume

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 sovereignty. Schmitt’s collapse of constituent power and sovereignty is well known, but I suggest that he did not simply take the two ideas to be interchangeable. Rather, he aimed to introduce a meaning for popular power that could be consistent with his definition of sovereignty as the power to decide on the exception. This was not provided by ideas of national and parliamentary sovereignty. The latter gave birth to liberal parliamentarianism, which he accused of dissolving the essence of sovereignty; the former encouraged direct and local democracy, which prevented the prompt expression of the sovereign will. By contrast, Schmitt found in Sieyes’ idea of constituent power a way to associate the extra-ordinary character of his account of sovereignty to the democratic principle of popular power. He thus presented constituent power as the meaning of sovereignty in democratic states. On his interpretation of Sieyes’ theory, constituent power belonged to the nation but, to be exercised, needed to be represented by a unitary figure, approved through plebiscites, and able to embody the unity of the nation acting as a unitary instance of decision: the sovereign dictator. The result is a complete reversal of Sieyes’ theory. 

Lucia Rubinelli - Sovereignty and Constituent Power in Weimar Germany”

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 Bengal, and letters from the Pacific. It shows how the circulation of material culture underpinned the emergence of a new materialist philosophy of the mind, while also demonstrating how a global approach to history can help us reassess issues such as race, technology, and politics today.

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

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

Emma Hunter - Africa and the Global History of Liberalism

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

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

Recordings from the popular public lecture series featuring new work on all aspects of intellectual history. Hosted by the Institute of Intellectual History at the University of St Andrews.