Biography
I completed a BA History at Cambridge in 2016, primarily taking papers in the history of political thought, before moving to the University of St Andrews to undertake an MLitt in the newly-established Institute of Legal and Constitutional Research. There I studied modules in legal theory, IR and international law, while also developing my undergraduate interest in the history of political thought. In 2018 I returned to Cambridge and Peterhouse to start my PhD research.
Research
Supervised by Prof. Annabel Brett, my PhD thesis examines how legal and political conceptions of 'world community' and 'human society' were constructed in the early-modern period, and how these ideas were used in European writings on the legal and political international order. I'm particularly interested to explore how such conceptions made use of idioms of earlier political thought - Stoic cosmopolitanism, Christian universalism, Roman law (to name a few) - and how these were combined by early-modern theorists to create new frameworks of moral and legal legitimacy.
My research engages with issues I'm interested in more broadly, such as the relationship between law and politics, the interface between the natural world and political constructions, the boundaries of universal human(/natural) rights, and how rights and obligations are legitimately grounded.
Other Research Interests
The history of international legal thought; medieval political thought; contemporary environmental political theory; critical legal studies; global constitutionalism; methodology in the history of political thought (esp. the influence of postmodernism)
Other Professional Activities
Co-Convenor, Cambridge Graduate Conference in Political Thought: Science, Certainty and Experise in Political Thought (2020)
Co-Convenor, Interventions: The Intellectual History Podcast (since October 2018)
Seminar Assistant, Cambridge Political Thought and Intellectual History Seminar (2018-19)
