The University of Manchester

Alumnus, History

Thesis Title: 'Raymond Aron and the Roots of the French Liberal Renaissance'

About

My general teaching and research interests are in modern European history, with specialist interests in the intellectual and cultural history of modern France. I am also more broadly interested in historical epistemology and its methodological implications.

My doctoral research focussed on the reception of eighteenth and nineteenth-century liberal thought by twentieth-century French intellectuals. The resulting PhD thesis, titled ‘Raymond Aron and the Roots of the French Liberal Renaissance’, was passed without corrections in October 2011. I have published research arising tangentially from my doctoral studies in European Review of History and Sartre Studies International. Further such publications are currently in press with History of European Ideas and Magazine Littéraire, along with a contribution to the collection Governing Diversity: Democracy, Diversity and Human Nature, forthcoming from Cambridge Scholars Publishing. My next major research project will be a history of French intellectuals exiled in London during the Second World War, centring on the network built up around the political and cultural review La France Libre.

In 2009 I taught modern European intellectual history at the University of Manchester before moving to Paris where I taught courses on the political and social history of twentieth-century France and French intellectuals since 1968 at Sciences Po. In 2010 I was promoted to a temporary lectureship at Sciences Po, where I devised and delivered a new course on the intellectual Cold War titled 'The Long Cold War of the Western Intelligentsia, 1914-1989'.