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Postgraduate Students
Current and former doctoral and MPhil students
Madeleine Armstrong
Madeleine Armstrong was awarded her PhD in 2023 for her dissertation Love and Duty in the Political Thought of Edmund Burke. She is now a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Politics at Princeton University.
Angus Brown
In 2021 Angus began his dissertation on 18th-century debates on constitutional guardianship, representative government, popular sovereignty, and the origins of Benjamin Constant’s doctrine of the Pouvoir Neutre, which he completed in the spring of 2024. His academic writing has been published or is forthcoming in the Intellectual History Review and the Journal of the History of Ideas. Other writing can be found in Jacobin, Engelsberg Ideas, The Erasmus Forum, and Tocqueville 21. Angus is currently Collegiate Assistant Professor in Social Science and Harper-Schimdt Fellow at the University of Chicago.
Anna Ceschi
Anna is completing a PhD on Simone de Beauvoir's feminist philosophy and political thought. In particular, she is most interested in the genealogical development of Beauvoir’s concept of situation during the 1940s. She also works on the history of political thought of feminist social movements during the 1970s.
Kenneth Foo
Kenneth Foo is currently researching on the political and philosophical writings of William Godwin, in particular his theory of crime and punishment.
Elias Forneris
Elias is completing a PhD on the political ideas of French and Belgian exiles in wartime Britain (1940-44). He works for The Tocqueville Review and is a Postgraduate Member of the Royal Historical Society. He previously graduated from Columbia University and Sciences Po Paris. A French national, he also ran for Parliament in the 2024 French legislative elections, in the expat constituency of North America.
Molly Gearen
Molly finished her PhD in the summer of 2024. It is titled “Visions of Evolutionary Theory in the Political Thought of British Socialists, 1880-1901.” The thesis explores the fissiparous ideas of human nature between the Social Democratic Federation, the Fabians, the Socialist League, and the group of Anarchists around Peter Kropotkin, which were articulated by those groups in an evolutionarily-infused vernacular. She completed an MA in Art History during the final year of her PhD and now works at Christie’s as a Graduate Trainee.
Samuel Harrison
Samuel Harrison completed his PhD on the evolution of the concept of citizenship in revolutionary France in 2024. He is now working on a project for the Turin Humanities Programme focusing on French ideas about slavery in the eighteenth century.
Emily Heywood
Emily Heywood completed her MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History in 2024. Her research looked at the political and historical writings of Helen Maria Williams (1759-1827) with a focus on her understanding of the history of women as a social group. She now works for the York Civic Trust and Fairfax House.
Callum Manchester
Callum's work focuses on the concept of moderation in eighteen-century British political thought. It explores the meaning and understanding of the term in political culture of the century with a particular focus on the texts and correspondence of the Reverend Christopher Wyvill.
Maximillian Priebe
Max Priebe worked on Adam Smith and Thomas Reid and on how they assessed the impact of the division of labour on the individual’s sense of judgement. He has afterwards completed a second masters in Paris (Paris-V, EHESS), where he worked on how the division of labour and the hereto connected rise of social complexity was received amongst later continental social theorists, most notably Georg Simmel, Niklas Luhmann and Edgar Morin. He is currently doing his PhD on the problem of ‘epistemic overload in the modern age’ under the supervision of Hartmut Rosa at the University of Jena, Germany.
Madeleine Rouot
Madeleine completed her PhD on François Guizot and the conceptual origin of the French education system. She is now working as an advisor for the French government.
Owen Sparkes
Owen Sparkes completed his MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History in 2020. His work focussed on the political thought of the transcendentalist movement. He was called to the Bar of England and Wales in 2023 and now works in corporate law, specialising in private equity.
Jia Wei
Jia Wei's thesis shows that the History can be understood in two ways: firstly, as Hume's own narrative of England's state formation, and secondly, as his answer to the question of how eighteenth-century Britain could cope with the challenges of commercial revolution. It illuminates the relationship between Hume the political thinker, Hume the historian, and Hume the political economist and highlights the social, economic and institutional changes which he wove into an innovative theory of causation. It was published under the title, Commerce and Politics in Hume's History of England (2017)
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