Biography

My thesis, titled ‘Thomas Hobbes on the powers of the mind: cognition, motivation and politics’, will be defended in September 2016. It situates Hobbes’s psychology in its historical context in order to consider what it meant, in the middle years of the 17th century, to have a ‘materialist’ model of human mental faculties, and the implications of this model for moral and political philosophy.
My research at the EUI will take these questions into the 18th century. More broadly, I am interested in ideas of human nature in the history of political thought.

During my PhD I have taught on courses in the School of History at QMUL and the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London. I hold an MA in Political Philosophy from the University of York, and a BA in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge.