Archive
- March 2021
Rhetoric in Research
18 March 2021
Rhetoric in Research Event in Collaboration with 'Speaking Citizens'
On 18 March 2021, Sussex Centre for Intellectual History, in conjunction with the Speaking Citizens Project, ran an afternoon event on ‘Rhetoric in Research’ for the School of Media, Arts and Humanities at the University of Sussex. This event reflected on how ‘rhetoric’ - or persuasive speech more broadly - features in research and teaching across a variety of disciplines, including History, Art History, Media, Music, Philosophy and English Literature. Participants recognized that the humanities have an important role to play in thinking critically about discussions of ‘free speech’, ‘demagoguery’, ‘fake news’, ‘alternative facts’, etc that pervade public discourse at present and to equip students with the skills to be fully engaged critical citizens. The purpose of the event was to forge connections as a foundation for funding applications and publications.
Colleagues across the School were given 7 minutes to present on how their research and teaching intersects with the topic of rhetoric or persuasive speech, broadly conceived, with discussion taking place over chat. Topics covered included: ‘Language and Power: A Chinese Perspective on the Art of Persuasion'; 'Emotions and Authority in the Rhetoric of Victorian Popular Science'; ‘Rhetoric from the Margins in Early Modern England’; ‘Rhetoric and the Citizenship Humanities’; ‘The history of feminist voice’; ‘Classical rhetoric and contemporary citizenship education: a winning formula?’; ‘Epideictic Rhetoric’; ‘Emerson, Thoreau, Foucault, sincerity, fearless speech, stoicism, and cynicism’; ‘The Rhetoric of Computational Structure’ ‘Caesarism, demagogues, and the politics of speech’; ‘Language and Persuasion’
Discussions are ongoing about next steps and ways forward. If you would like to participate in these discussions, please email Centre co-director, Dr Joanne Paul.
- February 2021
Women's International Thought - Book Launch
11 February 2021
Launch event for "Women's International Thought"
Online book launch for Patricia Owens and Katharina Rietzler's Women's International Thought: A New History (Cambridge University Press), with contributions from Duncan Bell (Cambridge), Synne Dyvik (Sussex) and Matthew Specter (Berkeley), and a live Q and A with the editors.
- April 2020
Counsel and Command - Book Launch
30 April 2020
Launch event for Joanne Paul's "Counsel and Command"
Online book launch for Joanne Paul's book, Counsel and Command in Early Modern English Thought (Cambridge University Press), with contributions from Vanessa Lim (QMUL) and Quentin Skinner (QMUL).
- February 2020
John Burrow Memorial Lecture 2019
13 February 2020
Anna Becker (Aarhus): “'Framed of Flesh and Bones, to Serve the Soul': Rethinking the Early Modern Body Politic”
The history of political thought has not yet had a bodily turn or a material turn in the same way other historical disciplines have had them. Motivated by the quest of understanding how our modern abstract idea of the state came into being, historians of political thought have perhaps not fully explored the implications of the body of the body politic. Turning upside-down a well-established focus in the history of political thought, this lecture will favour flesh over thought, body over artifice and the concrete over the abstract. Bringing politics in the realm of the tangible in this way can help us probe purported boundaries that target the heart of politics; namely the boundaries that seem to exist between the political and the apolitical, the public and private, the male and the female, and the state and nature.
- November 2019
Donald Winch Memorial Lecture 2019
21 November 2019
Sylvana Tomaselli (St John’s College, Cambridge): “In Praise of Grand Philosophical Histories”
Do we still need grand philosophical histories? In an age in which politics seems to be reduced to slogans, this lecture will argue for the importance of grand historical narratives not only in making sense of the past, but also as essential to political imagination and visions of the future. Discussing philosophical histories of women and civilization from the Enlightenment to socialism and from Wollstonecraft to Engels, Sylvana Tomaselli will make a case for historical narratives and counter-narratives – then, and now.
- March 2019
John Burrow Memorial Lecture 2019
21 March 2019
David Armitage (Harvard University): “Treaty Consciousness: Revisting John Locke's International Thought”
- February 2019
28 February 2019
Waseem Yaqoob (University of Cambridge): “Hannah Arendt and the historiographical limits to cosmopolitanism”
- November 2018
Donald Winch Memorial Lecture 2018
1 November 2018
Ann Thomson (EUI): “Enlightened Conversations”
- May 2018
Research and Training Workshop 2018
9 May 2018
An intellectual history workshop for PhD and early career researchers at Sussex
The programme for this event is available here
- November 2017
30 November 2017
Teresa Bejan (Oxford): “Rawls and the History of Political Thought”
- October 2017
26 October 2017
Joanne Paul (Sussex): “Counsel and Command in Early Modern England”
- October 2017
19 October 2017
Marco Duranti (Sydney): “International Human Rights and the Contradictions of French Colonialism”
Marco Duranti's book, The Conservative Human Rights Revolution, was published by Oxford University Press in February 2017.
- March 2017
John Burrow Memorial Lecture 2017
23 March 2017
Gareth Stedman Jones (QMUL): “Marx, the Tribune, and Protectionism”
- September 2016
Conference: Resistance in Intellectual History and Political Thought
15 and 16 September 2016
A Conference jointly hosted by the Centre for Intellectual History and Centre for Social and Political Thought
The programme for this event is available here
- October 2016
13 October 2016
Or Rosenboim (Queens' College, Cambridge): “'Gentlemen You Are Mad!': Atomic Bombs and Liberty in 1940s International Thought”
- November 2015
John Burrow Memorial Lecture 2015
12 November 2015
Richard Bourke (QMUL): “Edmund Burke and the Origins of Conservatism”
Is there a political philosophy of conservatism? Most attempts to answer this question try to explain conservative ideology in terms of a distinct tradition of thought. But does such a tradition really exist? The principal histories and typologies of conservatism uniformly trace its intellectual origins to the opposition to the French Revolution. Accordingly, Edmund Burke is standardly singled out as the ‘father’ of conservative politics. Yet Burke was a reforming Whig of the eighteenth century who devoted his career to the defence of popular rights. In this connection, he justified the American revolution against empire and the right of rebellion in India and Ireland. But what are we to make of his response to the French Revolution? By restoring Burke’s reaction to 1789 to its original historical context, this lecture takes issue with the predominant twentieth-century accounts of conservative ideology developed by such figures as Karl Mannheim, Klaus Epstein, Samuel Huntington and Albert Hirschman.
