Sungho Kimlee studies political theory ancient and modern. Currently based at Tsinghua University, he is writing a book comparing self-cultivation in ancient Greece, China, and India. His research interests include virtue ethics, comparative religion, and the history of democratic institutions. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 2017, and was a Berggruen Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. His dissertation, Factions and Orders: from Machiavelli to Madison, traced the evolution of political thought on civic divides. His article, “The plebe in the Florentine Histories: Machiavelli’s notion of humours revisited” has been published in History of European Ideas.
Kajo Kubala is a PhD candidate in History at Queen Mary, University of London. Prior to embarking on his PhD research, he completed an undergraduate degree in History at the University of Cambridge after which he joined Queen Mary and obtained a Master's degree in the History of Political Thought and Intellectual History. His PhD thesis focuses on the role that corporations played in the history of political thought, in particular in their capacity as laboratories for civic ideas and bodies politic that influenced the emergence of the concepts of state and sovereignty.
Sergio Leos studies the shifting intellectual perspectives in the early-modern era, especially throughout the Iberian Atlantic world of the 16th and 17th centuries. His current research focuses on the ways Europeans interpreted and accommodated the unfamiliar realities of the New World. Other interests include the practice of ethnography and the effects of migration on individual and collective senses of identity. Prior to entering the Ph.D. program at Harvard, Sergio completed his B.A. in History with a certificate in Latin American Studies at Princeton University in 2017.
Hangwei Li is a scholar of African society and politics, a political scientist at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS). She taught at the China Agricultural University after completing her doctorate at SOAS, University of London. She has also been an advisor of African Views Organisation and a Predoctoral fellow at Harvard Kennedy School, as well as a researcher at the Global Development Policy Centre, Boston University. Hangwei has a broad interest in African political thought, post-colonial theory, theories on media politics, political theories of migration, the political economy of Africa and China-Africa interactions.
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.
Han Hsien Liew is an intellectual historian of the premodern Islamic world and is currently Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. His research interests include medieval Islamic political thought; premodern Islamic scholarly culture and transmission of knowledge; Qur’anic exegesis (tafsir); and Arabic-Islamic historical and biographical writings.
Haidun Liu is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Government at Harvard. His research interests include political theory, the history of early modern European political thought, the history of Chinese political thought, and utopianism. Prior to entering the Ph.D. program, Haidun completed his B.A. in Philosophy and History at Columbia University in 2019 and was a Research Associate in Philosophy at the Morningside Institute.
Rosario López Sánchez is Lecturer in Ethics and Political Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, University of Málaga (Spain). Her work explores the relationship between philosophy, historiography, and politics. Her research focuses on the methods for the study of political thought and the history of political liberalism since the 19th century (John Stuart Mill, Richard Cobden). She also has a research interest in political thought and parliamentary debates, with a special focus on Britain and Spain.
Simon Sihang Luo is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford Civics Initiative. His current book project investigates the critical relationship between memories, emotions, and possibilities of democracy and democratization by taking the intellectual debates in post-Cultural Revolution China (1976-now) as a case study. His research and teaching interests include modern and contemporary political thought, comparative political theory, democratic theory, Marxism, critical theory, political emotions, and political memories.
Emma Stone Mackinnon is a political theorist and intellectual historian of human rights and humanitarianism, resistance and rebellion, race and empire, currently fellow at Emmanuel College and University Lecturer in the History of Modern Political Thought at Cambridge University. She has written on the political thought of the Algerian Revolution, politics and morality of war and the history of humanitarianism, Arthur Danto and the history of international law. Her current book project traces political contests over the meaning of human rights as a foundational promise of political community.
Clara Maier is a German political theorist and historian of political thought, now based at Columbia University. During her time at Cambridge University, she worked on "The Politics of German Peculiarity. American, British and German debates on the Sonderweg, 1933-1968". Since then, she has conducted research at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research and served as Assistant Professor of History at Humboldt University, Berlin. Her current research is focused on legal and constitutional theory, particularly the history of German and continental European concepts of statehood, law, and democracy in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Sama Mammadova is an Azerbaijanian scholar of European art and intellectual histories. After her joint BA in History and History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University in 2017, she is currently a PhD candidate in Harvard's History Department. She studies the economic, religious, social, and visual histories of late medieval and Renaissance Italy. Centered around the history of moneylending in the 14th-16th centuries, Sama's research analyzes ways in which theological discourses on usury and moral economy influenced the perception of penitence, magnificence, and artistic patronage in late medieval and Renaissance Italy.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta is a political theorist and intellectual historian of constitutional law, society and politics in India, governance and political economy, and international affairs. After graduating with a BA (first class) in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from Oxford and a PhD in politics from Princeton, Mehta has taught at Harvard University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and the New York University School of Law, and more recently, at the Ashoka University. Currently, he is the president and chief executive of the Centre for Policy Research (CPR), New Delhi.... Read more about Pratap Bhanu Mehta
