Thomas Ashby is a PhD Candidate at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, Italy. He is also a Research Fellow at the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi in Turin. His research centres on seventeenth-century English republicanism and its eighteenth-century afterlife in transnational, cross-confessional, and global contexts. Connected to this, he also has a research interest in the relationship between the English republic, as well as its posthumous ideologists, and practices of chattel slavery. His PhD is entitled “Liberty, Virtue, and the Commonwealth of Rights: The Republicanism of Algernon Sidney”. He was a convenor of the EUI Intellectual History Working Group from 2017-2020 and co-created the now annual EUI Graduate Conference in Intellectual History. Prior to joining the EUI, which has since awarded him an MRes in History, he completed an MA in the History of Political Thought and Intellectual History at the University of London (jointly administered by Queen Mary University of London and University College London) and a BA in History and Politics at Keble College, Oxford.
Yuqian Cai is a PhD candidate in Public Policy and Global Affairs at the School of Social Sciences and a writing instructor at the Nanyang Centre for Public Administration, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He obtained an MA in East Asian Studies from Yale University and a MALS degree in Creative Writing from Dartmouth College, and he worked at the University of Hong Kong and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. His current interests straddle the boundaries of international relations, political economy, intellectual history, and narrative research, with a focus on China’s vision and role in global governance, and more generally the Global South (especially South and Southeast Asia) in the emerging multiplex world order.
Yi Ning Chang is a political theorist with research interests in twentieth-century and postcolonial political thought. She specializes in mid-twentieth-century Southeast Asia; race and ethnicity; international law and politics in the global cold war; and theories of capitalism and development. Her dissertation offers a political theory of decolonization that begins in 1950s–60s Southeast Asia, focusing in particular on the political thought and action of postcolonial politicians in Malaya/Singapore and Indonesia. She received her B.A. (Hons) from the University of Cambridge in 2020 and held the Harold Laski Fellowship at Harvard in 2020–2021. At Harvard, she is a Graduate Student Associate at the Asia Center and a Graduate Student Affiliate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.
Théophile Deslauriers is a PhD candidate in the Department of Politics and at the University Centre for Human Values at Princeton University. He studies conquest and imperialism in the history of political thought, especially the relationship between commerce and empire in Early Modern political theory. He has co-organised the Princeton Political Theory Graduate Conference.
Sujin Heo is a PhD candidate in International Relations at the School of International Service, American University. She obtained an MA in International Relations from Seoul National University. Her research interests lie in the languages of international ordering in the early modern period. More specifically, her PhD project centers on the sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century natural law discourse of Iberian theologians and missionaries in Japan, as well as the reception of 'Spanish' thought in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century international law.
Hansong Li is a political theorist and historian of political, economic, and legal thought at the Department of Government, the Joint Centre for History and Economics, Minda de Gunzburg Centre for European Studies & Mittal Institute for South Asia at Harvard University, and currently a Research Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin, a fellow at the Centre for Global Intellectual History in Shanghai, and an affiliated faculty at the Nanjing Normal University. His previous works range from legal philosophy, political theory of time and space, and Tangutology, to geopolitics and political economy. His current book project explores the languages and practices of interstate justice in the West, South Asia, and East Asia.
Kelvin Ng is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at Yale University. His research interests broadly lie in the history of imperialism and anti-imperialism in the early-twentieth-century Indian Ocean circuit. Specifically, his current research project is situated between intellectual history and labor history, with a focus on forms of unfree labor migration—including slavery, indenture, prison labor, and debt bondage—that emerged to be generative of new spaces, novel forms of thought, and radical political claims around race, caste, nationality, and sovereignty.
Nicholas Pritchard is a geographer interested in the relationships between time, ecology, and history. He researches the history and philosophy of science in the late nineteenth century, exploration and extraction in the deep sea, the broader politics of the world ocean, and capitalist temporal regimes.
His PhD project looks at the construction of time(s) during British scientific research to the deep sea in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the texts and images from the Challenger Expedition, it asks how diverse temporalities – work-time regimes, imperial time, and “deep time”, for example – co-existed and informed one another. Broader, it asks how these temporal constructions interacted with early Modernist ideas of time and how these might have informed responses to climate catastrophe.
Nicholas is currently a PhD student in the geography department at the University of Cambridge and a visiting scholar at the Rachel Carson Centre at LMU, Munich. He previously studied for a BA in English at SOAS University of London and an MSt in Literature and Arts at Oxford.
