A Three-Day Conference

December 9th – December 12th, 2021 

RSVP Here

This three-day virtual conference on Hobbes’ perennially controversial work, Leviathan, takes advantage of its academic setting, whose disciplinary borders arguably create something like the “silo effect” much lamented in America’s currently divisive politics. This conference occasions an experiment in the permeability of academic borders, since Hobbes’ book is a cynosure for a remarkable number of academic fields.

Each field inevitably understands the text within the framework of its analytical values and methods, with the result that the different constructions academe has placed on his words have produced as many Leviathans as there are fields which claim him for their own.



This conference is co-sponsored by the UCI Center for Early Cultures and the UCI Humanities Center