Kinch Hoekstra (UC Berkeley)

Kinch Hoekstra teaches at Berkeley Law and the Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley, where he is also an affiliated professor in the departments of Philosophy and Classics.  He focuses on the history of political thought, particularly in ancient Greece and Renaissance and early modern Europe.

S. A. Lloyd (USC)

S.A. Lloyd is Professor of Philosophy and Law at the University of Southern California.  She received her B.A. from UCLA and her Ph.D. from Harvard University.  She is author of Ideals as Interests in Hobbes’s Leviathan (CUP 1992) and Morality in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes: Cases in the Law of Nature (CUP 2009); and is editor of Hobbes Today (CUP 2013), The Bloomsbury Companion to Hobbes (2013), and Interpreting Hobbes’s Political Philosophy (CUP 2019).  Her current research includes upcoming monographs from CUP, The Happy Hobbesian Commonwealth; Agency, Motivation, and Responsibility in Civil Society, and from OUP, Beyond the State of Nature: Agency, Character, and Responsibility in Citizens and Sovereigns. 

James Martel (San Francisco State)

James Martel teaches political theory in the department of political science at San Francisco State University. He is the author, most recently of Unburied Bodies: Subversive Corpses and the Authority of the Dead (Amherst College Press, 2018) and The Misinterpellated Subject (Duke University Press, 2017). He has a forthcoming book entitled Anarchist Prophets: Disappointing Vision and the Power of Collective Sight  (Duke University Press). 

Ted H. Miller (University of Alabama)

Ted H. Miller teaches political theory at the University of Alabama. He is author of Mortal Gods: Science, Politics, and the Humanist Ambitions of Thomas Hobbes, and of the forthcoming (2022) book Friendly Sovereignty, a historical rejoinder to Carl Schmitt’s eclipse of rival understandings of sovereignty.

Markku Peltonen (University of Helsinki)

Markku Peltonen is Professor of History at the University of Helsinki. He has published widely on early modern intellectual history, including Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought 1570–1640 (1995), The Duel in Early Modern England: Civility, Politeness and Honour (2003) and Rhetoric, Politics and Popularity in Pre-Revolutionary England (2012) all published by Cambridge University Press. He has edited The Cambridge Companion to Bacon (1996). He has been the recipient of numerous research fellowships and awards in such institutions as the Institute for Advanced Study; Clare Hall, Cambridge; CRASSH, Cambridge; The Huntington Library; Trinity College, Cambridge. His latest book, The Political Thought of the English Free State, 1649–1653, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2022. He is the general editor of the forthcoming Cambridge History of Democracy. 

Tracy B. Strong (UC San Diego)

Strong has broad interests in political theory and in related fields in political science, aesthetics, literature and other areas. He is the author of several books including Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration (currently in its third edition); The Idea of Political Theory: Reflections on the Self in Political Time and Space; and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Politics of the Ordinary (second edition), as well as the editor or co-editor of Nietzsche’s New Seas, The Self and the Political Order,Public Space and Democracy, and The One and the Many. Ethical Pluralism in Contemporary Perspectives. He has written numerous articles and essays in a variety of journals. His most recent book is Politics Without Vision: Thinking without a Banister in the Twentieth Century (Chicago, 2012) [Winner of the David Easton Prize, 2013].   He is currently working on a book on music, language, and politics in the period that extends from Rousseau to Nietzsche. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Rockefeller Foundation, has been Visiting Professor at the Juan March Instituto in Spain and Warwick University in England, and was a Fellow at the Center for Human Values, Princeton University (2002-03). From 1990 until 2000 he was Editor of Political Theory.

Jayne Lewis (UC Irvine)

My research interests include the literature and culture of the British Enlightenment, gothic fiction, and medical aesthetics. I also have a strong interest in modern mysticism, which some of my work approaches as an unmediated encounter with metaphor that occurs within linguistic form. My previous books have taken up topics as varied as the animal fable and the figure of Aesop in 18th-century England’s consolidating print culture, representations of Mary Queen of Scots and the problem of the non-historical, and the emergence of “atmosphere” as an aesthetic category in 18th-century literature. Most recently, I edited the anthology RELIGION IN ENLIGHTENMENT ENGLAND(Baylor 2017). My current research project, “’Silence of Sense’: Sleep and the Second Person,” explores connections between the modernization of sleep—the Enlightenment recalibration of sleep hygiene, sleep morality, and sleep aesthetics as techniques of embodied disembodiment—and the protocols of non-sensory empiricism and dislocated intent that govern formal realism’s emergent aesthetic. Visible in texts as varied as ROBINSON CRUSOE, HARRINGTON, EDGAR HUNTLY, CLARISSA, THE MOONSTONE, and DRACULA, those protocols were rehearsed dialectically in (and with) the courtroom,the clinic, quietist devotional practice, and, inevitably, the bedroom.

Graduate Participants:

Peter Thomas (UCLA)

I study the intellectual history of Europe in those centuries we have learned to call “early modern,” chiefly in Italy and England from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. My major interests are in the history of political thought and may be best elucidated further by the two figures around whom those interests cohere: Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes. I am, above all, fascinated by those species of political thinking that are sensible of language and its role in constructing politics—its realities and its fantasies. My research, then, necessarily concerns the intersections of “political thought” with the faculties of rhetoric and aesthetics, science and theology as they were represented and contested in the early modern epistemic cosmos: a cosmos often resembling more of a chaos to the historical writers who interest me as well as their modern readers. My attention is presently divided between work on political and poetic language in Hobbes and the relationship between language, corruption, and liberty in quattrocento Florentine thought.

Joseph Warren (UC Berkeley)

I am a PhD candidate in political science at UC Berkeley, and my main areas of study are American political development and game theory. My dissertation draws upon historical cases from early America to develop three formal models of legal authority. First, I argue that traditional republican concerns about economic inequality complement more recent theories of the rule of law based on citizen coordination. Second, I investigate how the structure of legal authority—whether concentrated in a small number of institutions or diffused through many institutions in society—affects outcomes of the legal system. Third, I consider how the boundaries of legal authority change over time by analyzing a dynamic bargaining model in which two actors (representing institutions) incrementally exchange policy for authority, as occurred between colonial assemblies and metropolitan officials in the lead-up to the American revolution. Prior to UC Berkeley, I attended Reed College, where I majored in political science and economics.

Chelsea Lee (UC Irvine)

Chelsea Lee is a second year PhD student in the English Department at UCI. Her interests include Early Modern literature and Medical Humanities with her research up to this point mainly focusing on Shakespeare and death. She previously earned her master’s degree at BYU where she wrote on the influence of execution narratives and will writing in Shakespeare’s plays. As an intern for the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, she completed a research project using the early medical texts housed in the Birthplace archives to analyze the role of on-stage corpses in Shakespearean performance.

Juan Carlos “JC” Fermin (UC Irvine)

Juan Carlos “JC” Fermin is a third-year English PhD student at the University of California, Irvine. JC’s areas of focus are Postcolonial theory and the Philippine Diaspora, but he’s also become an avid student of Afropessimism, Decolonial Feminisms, and Non-Western Radical Traditions. JC is invested in the evocative forms of cultural production precipitated by crisis and revolution – before, during, and after – and the relationship between these movements and insurrectionary violence.