The Oxford Political Thought Seminar runs on Mondays in Michaelmas and Hilary terms, 5-6.30, in Lecture Room 6, New College (unless otherwise stated).
Hilary term 2024
New Book: Toni Morrison: Imagining Freedom
‘José Sarria’s performance archive and the making of nelly queens, 1953-1963′
University College: 10 Merton Street Lecture Theatre
‘Paolo Sarpi’s History of the Council of Trent (1619/20) and early modern conciliar thinking’
New College: Lecture Room 6
‘Feminism Re-Scaled: From Subject and Ethics to Structures and Politics’
New College: Lecture Room 6
2023-2024: Michaelmas term
Week 1, *Friday* Oct 13: Melissa Lane (Princeton)
Discussion of Of Rule and Office: Plato’s Ideas of the Political
Week 3, Mon Oct 23: Ulas Ince (SOAS)
From “Civilization” to “Race”: The Political Economy of Imperial Subjecthood
Week 4, Mon Oct 30: Musab Younis (QMUL)
Scale in Anticolonial Thought
Week 5, Mon Nov 6: Karuna Mantena (Columbia)
Why and How Gandhi Civilized Disobedience
Week 6, Mon Nov 13: Marinos Sariyannis (Foundation for Research and Technology — Hellas)
Ottoman political thought before the Tanzimat reforms (c. 1839) *online seminar*
Week 7, *Friday* Nov 24: Linda Zerilli (Chicago)
Towards a Freedom-Centred Feminist Historiography
Week 8, Mon Nov 27: Alison McQueen (Stanford)
The Poisoned Tree: Treason of the Heart In Seventeenth-Century England
2019-2020
MT
W1 Oct 18: Katrina Forrester (Harvard)
W2 Oct 25: Shannon Stimson (Georgetown)
W3 Nov 1 Sean Fleming (Cambridge)
W4 Nov 8 Barbara Arneil (University of British Columbia)
W5 Nov 15th Ed Lucas (Oxford)
W6 *Thursday* 6 Nov 21 Angus Burgin (Johns Hopkins)
W7 Nov 29 Anne Verjus (ENS Lyon)
W8 Dec 6 Jeanne Morefield (Birmingham)
HT
W1 Jan 24: Faridah Zaman (Oxford)
W2 Jan 31: Ainsley LeSure (Occidental)
W3 Feb 7: Mira Siegelberg (Queen Mary)
W4 Feb 14: Hagar Kotef (SOAS)
W5 Feb 21: Jill Frank (Cornell)
W6 Feb 28: Deni Kasa (Tel Aviv)
W7 Mar 6: Murad Idris (UVA)
W8 Mar 14 Peter Adamson (Carlyle lecturer)
Past OPT seminars:
2018-2019
MT
Week 1, October 12th: Signy Gutnick Allen (LSE)
Week 2, October 19th: Michael Freeden (Oxford)
Week 3, October 26th: Adom Getachew (Chicago)
Week 4, November 2: Dan Luban (Oxford)
Week 5, November 9th: Martha Nussbaum (Chicago) **venue change: Michael Drummond Lecture Theatre, Christ Church**
Week 6, November 16th: Michael Goodhart (Pittsburgh)
Week 7, November 23rd: Justine Lacroix and Jean-Yves Pranchère (Université Libre de Bruxelles)
Week 8, November 30th: Annabel Brett (Cambridge)
HT:
Week 1, 18 Jan: Barbara Savage (UPenn)
Week 2, 25 Jan: Mark Fisher (Georgetown)
Week 3, 1 Feb: James Harris (St Andrews)
Week 4, 8 Feb : Shatema Threadcraft (Dartmouth)
Week 5, 15 Feb: Marius Ostrowski (Oxford)
Week 6, 22 Feb: Richard Whatmore (St Andrews)
Week 7, 1 March: Sofie Møller (Frankfurt)
Week 8, 8 March: Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins (Yale)
2017-2018
MT
October 13, Week 1: ‘Before On Liberty: Samuel Bailey and the Nineteenth-Century Theory of Free Speech’ — Greg Conti (Cambridge)
October 20, Week 2: ‘Hayek’s Political Thought: Development, Problems and Heritage’ — Jeremy Shearmur (ANU)
October 27, Week 3: Discussion of Peter Ghosh, ‘Constructing Marx in the History of Ideas’ — Peter Ghosh (Oxford), David Leopold (Oxford) Marc Mulholland (Oxford), Julia Nicholls (KCL)
November 3, Week 4: ‘Alienation and Racial Hegemony’ — Sarah Bufkin (Oxford)
November 10, Week 5: ‘Thomas More’s Utopia and utopian writing in Arabic in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ — Peter Hill (Oxford)
November 17, Week 6: ‘Political Theory and the Dark Arts’ — Steven Smith (Yale)
November 24, Week 7: ‘History and Judgment in the thought of Hannah Arendt’ — Waseem Yaqoob (Cambridge)
December 1, Week 8: ‘The People Trap’ — Sofia Näsström (Uppsala)
HT
January 19, Week 1: ‘Chains and Invisible Threads: Marx on Domination and Republican Liberty’ — Bruno Leipold (Goethe University Frankfurt / Free University of Berlin)
January 26, Week 2: ‘Problems of socialist strategy redux’ — Madeleine Davis (Queen Mary University of London)
February 3, Week 3: ‘Dominus before Domination: Harriet Jacobs on Property and Slavery’ — Desmond Jagmohan (Princeton)
February 9, Week 4: ‘Constitutions before Constitutionalism: A Discussion of the Carlyle Lectures’ — Melissa Lane (Princeton)
February 16, Week 5: <<no seminar>>
February 23, Week 6: << seminar cancelled — UCU strike >>
March 2, Week 7: Thomas Hobbes and Reformed Ethics Noah Dauber (Colgate)
March 9, Week 8: Street-Level Bureaucracy and Democratic Theory — Bernardo Zacka (Cambridge / MIT)
Sophie Smith 