Professor Quentin Skinner, FBA
Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities
Location: Arts Two 3.12email: q.skinner@qmul.ac.uk
Quentin Skinner joined Queen Mary in 2008. He began his career at Cambridge, where he was appointed a Lecturer in History in 1965. He was at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton between 1974 and 1979, after which he returned to Cambridge, first as Professor of Political Science (1979-1996) and thereafter as Regius Professor of History (1996-2008). He has also held visiting appointments in Australia, Belgium, France, Germany and the United States.
Professor Skinner’s scholarship is available in 24 languages, and has won him numerous prizes, including the Balzan Prize, the Wolfson Prize, the Bielefelder Wissenschaftspreis, the Sir Isaiah Berlin Prize and the Benjamin Lippincott and David Easton Awards of the American Political Science Association. He is the holder of Honorary degrees from the Universities of Aberdeen, Athens, Chicago, East Anglia, Harvard, Helsinki, Leuven, Oslo, Oxford, Santiago and St Andrews. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Historical Society and the Academia Europea, and a Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Royal Irish Academy, the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei and the Österreichische Academie der Wissenschaften
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.Postgraduate supervision:
Professor Skinner has so far supervised 25 PhDs, and is eager to welcome new graduate students. Recently he has supervised -- or is currently supervising -- dissertations on early-modern ideas about selfhood, political interests, freedom and property, counsel and counselling, colonisation, republicanism and empire.
Publications:
(A) Books:
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)
(B) Books edited:
Philosophy, Politics and Society (Blackwells, 1972) [Co-editor and contributor]
Philosophy in History (CUP, 1984) [Co-editor and contributor]
The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences (CUP 1985) [Editor and contributor]
The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (CUP, 1988) [Co-editor and contributor]
Machiavelli, The Prince (trans. Russell Price) (CUP, 1988) [Co-editor]
Machiavelli and Republicanism (CUP, 1990) [Co-editor and contributor]
Political Discourse in Early-modern Britain (CUP, 1993) [Co-editor and contributor]
Milton and Republicanism (CUP, 1995) [Co-editor]
Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, (CUP, 2002) [Co-editor and contributor]
States and Citizens: History, Theory, Prospects (CUP, 2003) [Co-editor and contributor]
Thomas Hobbes: Writings on Common Law and Hereditary Right (The Clarendon Edition, Volume XI) (Clarendon Press, 2005) [Co-editor]
Sovereignty in Fragments: The Past, Present and Future of a Contested Concept (CUP, 2010) [Co-editor and contributor]
Families and States in Western Europe (CUP, 2011) [Editor]
Postgraduate teaching:
Professor Skinner conducts a seminar and supervises dissertations for the MA in the History of Political Thought and Intellectual History.