Laughter and civil conversation: from Castiglione to Hobbes

CREMS Seminar

Quentin Skinner joined Queen Mary as Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities in 2008.  He began his career at the University of Cambridge, where he was appointed a Fellow of Christ’s College in 1962 and a Lecturer in the Faculty of History in 1965.  He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton between 1974 and 1979, after which he returned to Cambridge, where he was Professor of Political Science between 1979 and 1996, and Regius Professor of History between 1996 and 2008.  He has also held visiting appointments in Australia, Belgium, France, Germany and the United States.  In 1999 he served as Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, and in 2001 he was awarded the University’s teaching prize.‌

Professor Skinner is the author or co-author of more than 20 books, and his scholarship has won him many awards, including the Wolfson History Prize (1979), the Balzan Prize (2006) and the Bielefelder Wissenschaftspreis (2008).  He has been the recipient of honorary degrees from 12 leading Universities, including, Chicago, Harvard and Oxford.  He is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Historical Society and the Academia Europea, and is a foreign member of the national academies of Austria, Ireland, Italy and the United states.  His scholarship is available in 24 languages, and his Foundations of Modern Political Thought (2 vols., 1978) was named by the Times Literary Supplement in 1996 as one of the 100 most influential books published since the second world war. 

Research interests:

Professor Skinner works on early-modern European intellectual history, with a particular interest in the rhetorical culture of the Renaissance and the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes.  He has also written about a number of philosophical questions, including the nature of interpretation and historical explanation, and about several issues in contemporary political theory, including the concept of political liberty and the character of the State.

Publications:

The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: Volume I: The Renaissance (CUP, 1978)

The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: Volume II: The Age of Reformation (CUP, 1978)

Machiavelli (OUP, 1981)

Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (CUP, 1996)

Liberty before Liberalism (CUP, 1998)

Visions of Politics: Volume I: Regarding Method (CUP, 2002)

Visions of Politics: Volume II: Renaissance Virtues (CUP, 2002)

Visions of Politics: Volume III: Hobbes and Civil Science (CUP, 2002)

L’artiste en philosophie politique (Editions du Seuil, 2003)

Hobbes and Republican Liberty (CUP, 2008)

Refreshments available from 3.45