IIntellectual history flourishes at Oxford, where there is widespread interest in ideas and authors from all periods and many countries. Here, intellectual historians are united by our concern for the arguments of the past, studied to understand the intellectual purposes they were designed to serve in their historical contexts. For this reason, there is no exclusive ‘school’; rather, intellectual history is fully integrated into the broader history faculty and its practitioners are free to range widely in their studies. Our research covers not only the history of political and social thought, but also historiography, philosophy, theology, and the history of science and art. Such variety is fostered and advanced by strong inter-disciplinary connections, and scholars working in politics, philosophy, literature and theology regularly meet to discuss their work.
There is no separate track for graduate students wishing to study intellectual history, for its themes can be studied within any of the Masters courses. Graduates are encouraged to develop their own interests in the ideas of the past, and can choose to explore these through their optional essays and through the dissertation. In their study they can draw upon the wide range and expertise of Oxford’s intellectual historians and take advantage of the varied programme of seminars and events. Graduate students also have the chance to take a class on ‘Approaches to Intellectual History’ as part of their training in the theories and methods of history.
Within the Oxford Intellectual History Network there are a broad range of seminars, addressing the many different themes and interests of Oxford historians. Current seminars include the Early Modern Intellectual History Seminar, the Enlightenment Workshop, the History of Political Thought Seminar (run in conjunction with the Politics Department), and seminars on the History of the Book and Language and History. There are also two series of lectures by distinguished visitors: the annual Carlyle Lectures in the History of Political Thought, and the lectures by the Isaiah Berlin Visiting Professor of Intellectual History. Other seminars and conferences are organized in conjunction with the Voltaire Foundation, the Maison Française and the Bestermann Centre for the Enlightenment. Oxford is also home to ‘Cultures of Knowledge’, a major project to map the intellectual geography of the seventeenth-century Republic of Letters, and supports the International Society for Intellectual History.
Highlights among our own recent publications include George Garnett, Marsilius of Padua and ‘the Truth of History’ (2006); Noel Malcolm, Reason of State, Propaganda, and the Thirty Years' War: An Unknown Translation by Thomas Hobbes (2007); Ian Maclean and John Brooke (eds.) Heterodoxy in early modern science and religion (2005); Howard Hotson, Commonplace Learning: Ramism and its German Ramifications, 1543-1630 (2007); Peter Harrison, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (2007); Rhodri Lewis, Language, Mind and Nature: artificial language in England from Bacon to Locke (2007); Sarah Mortimer Reason and Religion in the English Revolution (2010); Richard Scholar, The Je-ne-sais-quoi in Early Modern Europe: Encounters with a Certain Something (2005); John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment. Scotland and Naples 1680-1760 (2005), David Womersley, Divinity and the State (2010) and Brian Young The Victorian Eighteenth Century (2007).
International Society for Intellectual History
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