Keith Topper (UC Irvine)

Keith Topper is a political theorist who specializes in the history of political thought and contemporary political theory. His research focuses broadly on questions regarding the relationship between language and political agency, a concern that has led to work in democratic and liberal theory, interpretive theory, critical theory, rhetoric and political theory, theories of power, theories of embodiment, and the philosophy of the social sciences. These projects engage a wide range of thinkers from Machiavelli and Hobbes to Hannah Arendt, Pierre Bourdieu, Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor, Quentin Skinner and Michel Foucault. He is the author of The Disorder of Political Inquiry (Harvard University Press, 2005) and co-editor (with Dilip Gaonkar) of The Oxford Handbook of Rhetoric and Political Theory (Oxford University Press, 2022) and Commitments in a Post-Foundationalist Age: Exploring the Possibilities of Weak Ontology (special issue of The Hedgehog Review). In addition, he has publications in an array of journals, including Political Theory, American Political Science Review, The Journal of Politics, and Constellations. He is currently working on two books, one which investigates the “rhetorical turn” in political theory, and another which focuses on the political theory of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.

Victoria Silver (UC Irvine)

Victoria Silver, Ph.D. English, UCLA, has taught at the University of
Rochester and Columbia University and is currently a professor at the
University of California, Irvine. She has published on Milton
(“Imperfect Sense: The Predicament of Milton’s Irony,” Princeton UP),
Hobbes, Marvell, Sir Thomas Browne, Ben Jonson, Algernon Sidney, and Sir
Henry Vane the Younger. Her current book project, “A Just Deception:
Equity and the Rhetoric of Dissent, 1660-1685,” addresses Browne,
Bunyan, William Penn and Sidney (hopefully forthcoming from Oxford UP
sometime in the next decade).

Graduate Organizer

Holly Weaver (UC Irvine)

Holly Weaver is a 3rd year political theory PhD student at the University of California, Irvine. She received a BA in Philosophy from the University of Nottingham and a MA in Philosophy from King’s College London. Her research focuses on the history of political thought, the philosophy of immigration, democratic theory and the sociology of education. She is currently working on a project which explores the moral case for open borders.