Writing global intellectual histories: the body-political metaphor – lecture by Serena Ferente (University of Amsterdam)
Date and time: Tuesday 14 November, 16.00-17.30
Place: Amsterdam, Bushuis E 1.02
Abstract
Is global intellectual history possible and meaningful before modern globalising processes? What should be its object? This paper reflects on questions of method from a longue durée perspective and offers a preliminary examination of a long-standing political metaphor – the ‘body politic’.
Biography
Serena Ferente is full professor of Medieval History at the University of Amsterdam. She is a graduate of the Scuola Normale in Pisa and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. She received her PhD in History and Civilisation from European University Institute in 2007. From 2006 until her appointment at the UvA, she has been, successively, a lecturer, senior lecturer and reader in Medieval and Renaissance History at King’s College London. Ferente’s research focuses on Europe and the Mediterranean in the 14th to 16th centuries, particularly the history of politics and society in Italy, the history of European political discourse, and gender history. She is currently working on a book on the history of 15th century Europe and starting a project on the late medieval Black Sea as a primary border region of Eurasia.
Lecture by Torsten Tschacher (South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg): title t.b.a.
Date and time: Tuesday 13 February 2024, 16.00-17.30
Place: Utrecht, Janskerkhof 13, 0.06
‘Only that which has no history is definable’ (Nietszche) – lecture by Mark Philp (Warwick)
Date and time: Tuesday 26 March 2024, 16.00-17.30
Place: Utrecht, Kromme nieuwegracht 80, 1.06
Abstract
In this paper Mark Philp will discuss two strands of research that he has followed for more than 20 years – on democracy and on political corruption – as a way of reflecting on Nietszche’s comment and on its implications for the belief that history retains a relevance to our understanding and analysis of the modern world.
Biography
Mark Philp is a British political philosopher and historian of political thought who specialises in British political thought in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He has published books on Thomas Paine and on responses to the French Revolution in Britain. Philp was a Fellow of Oriel College from 1983 to 2013, and was head of the then newly created University of Oxford Department of Politics and International Relations from 2000 to 2005. He is currently professor of History and Politics at the University of Warwick working on political corruption and the standards of public life, as well as democratic thought in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. With Joanna Innes (Oxford), he co-directs the research project ‘Re-imagining Democracy 1750-1850’.