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.

    Early modern image of a personification of rhetoric
  • 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.

    Women's International Thought Book Cover
  • 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).

    Cover of Joanne Paul Counsel and Command book
  • 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.

    Poster for Anna Becker John Burrow Memorial Lecture
  • 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”

    Poster for Ann Thomson Enlightened Conversations Lecture
  • 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

    Title page of eighteenth-century French journal
  • November 2017
    30 November 2017

    Teresa Bejan (Oxford): “Rawls and the History of Political Thought”

    Rawls smiling
  • October 2017
    26 October 2017

    Joanne Paul (Sussex): “Counsel and Command in Early Modern England”

    Cover of Joanne Paul Counsel and Command book
  • 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.

    Marco Duranti book on human rights cover
  • March 2017

    John Burrow Memorial Lecture 2017

    23 March 2017

    Gareth Stedman Jones (QMUL): “Marx, the Tribune, and Protectionism”

    Poster for Gareth Stedman Jones lecture on Marx
  • 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

    Poster for Sussex Resistance conference in 2016 showing Tianenmen Square protester
  • October 2016
    13 October 2016

    Or Rosenboim (Queens' College, Cambridge): “'Gentlemen You Are Mad!': Atomic Bombs and Liberty in 1940s International Thought”

    Photo of atomic explosion
  • 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.

    Poster for Bourke Burke lecture 2015