Directorships
Director
Dr Alasia Nuti
Alasia Nuti is a Senior Lecturer in Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of York. She works in contemporary political theory and gender studies and she has a strong interest in postcolonial theory and critical race theory. In particular, Alasia is interested in historical injustice, responsibility, structural injustice, memory, immigration and pluralism. Her first book, entitled Injustice and the Reproduction of History (Cambridge University Press, 2019), which examines why the unjust past matters from a normative perspective, was awarded an Honorable Mention from the ECPR Prize in Political Theory in 2021. She recently co-authored a book with Gabriele Badano, entitled Politicizing Political Liberalism: On the Containment of Illiberal and Antidemocratic Views (Oxford University Press, 2024), which puts forward the first comprehensive account of containment of illiberal and anti-democratic views from within Rawlsian political liberalism and contributes to debates over political liberalism and democratic backsliding. In 2022, Alasia was awarded the Early Career Prize from the Britain and Ireland Association for Political Thought for excellence in research and teaching.
Deputy Director
Dr Udit Bhatia
Udit Bhatia is a political theorist whose research focuses on normative democratic theory, constitutionalism, and political epistemology, and a Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of York. Some of his recent papers have examined the legal and normative status of political parties, asking how their internal rules should be configured. In other work, he has engaged with epistocracy, the notion that competent persons should enjoy exclusive or disproportionate political power. He is also interested in the history of political thought, especially in relation to democratic institutions. Outside of political theory, Udit is passionate about dogs and Edwardian furniture.
Associate Directors
Dr Eliran Bar-El
Eliran Bar-El is a sociologist of knowledge and a Lecturer in Sociology In the Department of Sociology at the University of York. He is the author of Multiplitism: Set Theory and Sociology (Palgrave, 2021) and How Slavoj Became Zizek: The Digital Making of a Public Intellectual (The University of Chicago Press, 2025). Bar-El’s teaching and research interests include social theory, knowledge production and consumption, cultural sociology, and intellectual interventions.
Dr Hannah Carnegy-Arbuthnott
Hannah Carnergy-Arbuthnott is a Lecturer in the Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the University of York. Before joining York, I held research fellowships at McGill and Stanford. Hannah works on issues in social and political philosophy, including feminist philosophy. Her research focusses on theories of property and self-ownership, with a view to understanding the kinds of rights we have over our bodies, external objects, intellectual property or even personal data. She is interested in the idea that self-ownership provides a useful framework for mapping the rights of individuals, even if it isn’t a fundamental natural right.
Dr Laura Forster
Laura Forster is a historian of radical and socialist ideas, cultures, and communities in Modern Britain, and a Lecturer in Modern History in the Department of History at the University of York. Her research is concerned with the social life of ideas: the social, emotional, and spatial contexts within which radical ideas are produced and propagated. Broadly speaking Laura interested in how activists, political groups, and ordinary people experience and generate political ideas. As such, her work is also concerned with the afterlives of revolutionary and radical activity, in how memories and mythologies of past activism are redeployed in new historical presents. Laura has two books forthcoming - The Paris Commune in Britain: radicals, refugees, and revolutionaries after 1871 (Oxford University Press, 2025), and Friends in Common: radical friendship & everyday solidarities, co-authored with Joel White (Pluto Press, 2025). She is currently working on a new project about intimacy, activism, and spaces of prefigurative politics in nineteenth century Britain.
Professor Martin O’Neill
Martin O'Neill is Professor of Political Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the University of York. Before switching across to the Philosophy department in 2018, he taught for 8 years in the Department of Politics (2010-18). Martin is the co-author (with Joe Guinan) of The Case for Community Wealth Building (Polity, 2019) and the co-editor of Property-Owning Democracy: Rawls and Beyond (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), and Taxation: Philosophical Perspectives (OUP, 2018). He is a member of the Trustee Board of The Democracy Collaborative, a 'think-and-do' tank based in Washington DC, which works on models for the democratic economy, and has also been an adviser to the UK Labour Party's Community Wealth Building Unit. Before coming to York in 2010, Martin was Hallsworth Research Fellow in Political Economy in MANCEPT at the University of Manchester and, before that, Research Fellow in Philosophy at St John's College, Cambridge. He was educated at Balliol College, Oxford (BA in PPE, BPhil in Philosophy) and Harvard University (PhD in Philosophy). Martin writes on various issues relating to the theory and practice of social and economic justice.
Dr Hannah Roche
Hannah Roche is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture in the Department of English and Related Literature. Her research focuses on queer literature and cultural history, transatlantic modernism, and the relationship between literature and the law. Hannah is the author of The Outside Thing: Modernist Lesbian Romance (Columbia University Press, 2019) and co-editor (with Jana Funke, University of Exeter) of the Oxford World's Classics edition of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness (2024). She is Principal Investigator on an AHRC Research Network, Coercive Control: From Literature into Law.
Dr Tim Stuart-Buttle
Tim Stuart-Buttle is a Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of York, who joined in September 2017 as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the Leverhulme Trust-funded project Rethinking Civil Society: History, Theory, Critique. Tim’s research and teaching focuses on early modern European intellectual history, and the history of political thought. Tim is an intellectual historian of early modern Europe who works on the relationship between moral philosophy, theology and political thought. His first book, From Moral Theology to Moral Philosophy: Cicero and Visions of Humanity from Locke to Hume (Oxford University Press, 2018) explored how British philosophers from Locke to Hume turned to the late Hellenistic world, and in particular to the writings of Cicero, as offering valuable insights into the origins and sustaining mechanisms of civil society. Tim is currently a Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies working on a project on gratitude and grace in early modern political thought.
Tim completed his doctorate at the University of Oxford in 2013. His thesis explored the importance of the late Hellenistic philosophical traditions, and especially a variety of academic scepticism identified closely with Cicero, to the development of British moral, religious and political thought from Locke to Hume. (A revised version of the thesis will be published as a monograph by Oxford University Press in early 2018.) From 2014-17 he was a postdoctoral Research Associate on the European Research Council-funded interdisciplinary project, Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern England: The Place of Literature, at the University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge.