Cambridge Graduate Conference in Political Thought and Intellectual History 2026

This year’s Cambridge Graduate Conference in Political Thought and Intellectual History will take place on Wednesday 24 June from 9am at the Winstanley Lecture Theatre in Trinity College.  

To register for a ticket, please click this link:https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cambridge-graduate-conference-in-political-thought-and-intellectual-history-tickets-1981444850888?aff=oddtdtcreator

The conference will provide a space for reflections on a basic human impulse: the desire for refuge. Political communities have their origins in our need for shelter. But what if a place of refuge turns out to be just as unsafe as the place we have left behind? A keynote address will be delivered by Demetra Kasimis (University of Cambridge). 

Programme

Registration (9:00am – 9:30am)

Opening Remarks (9:30am – 9:45am)

Keynote Lecture (9:45am – 11:15am)

Demetra Kasimis, University of Cambridge
“Hospitality’s Hidden Abode"

Morning Break (11:15am – 11:30am)

Panel 1 – "Sites of Shelter" (11:30am – 1:00pm)

Michael Wayne, Yale University,
"The Asylum of the Afflicted: the Morisco Expulsion (1609-1614) in the Mémoires of Cardinal Richelieu"

Xinbei Wang, University of Birmingham,
“Quasi-Colonial Refuge: Consular Space, Violence, and Protection in Nineteenth-Century China”

Leonardo Menezes, University of Minho,
“Structural Injustice and the Law: Between Encampment and Self-Settled Refuge in Africa”

Lunch Break (1pm – 1:45pm)

Panel 2 – "Voices in Exile" (1:45pm – 3:15pm)

Gabriel Rom, Yale University,
“Reading Rousseau in Exile: Polish Romantics and “The Considerations on the Government of Poland””

Ben Stemper, Uppsala University,
“A Republic for our sons, not our fathers: Reconfiguring the Republic in the works of Jean-Félix Mas and Joseph Déjacque between 1848 and the American Exile”

Maximilian Spitz, University of Oxford,
“Refugee in Hiding or Engaged Political Actor? The Duality of Edmund Ludlow’s Exile in Switzerland”

Afternoon Break (3:15pm – 3:30pm)

Panel 3 – "Refuge in the Familiar" (3:30pm – 5pm)

Swetabja Mallik, University of Hyderabad,
“The Home as Non-Territorial Refuge in British India”

Inês Pinheiro, NOVA University Lisbon,
“From the Refuge of Friendship to the Rootedness of the Soul: Revisiting Obedience with Montaigne, La Boétie, and Weil”

Jack Graveney, University of Cambridge,
“Normality as Refuge: Hans Magnus Enzensberger on Post-1968 West Germany”

Tea Break (5pm – 5:30pm)

Panel 4 – "Reimagining Refuge" (5:30pm – 7:30pm)

Lorenzo Ferraro, University of Genova,
“Utopia as Refuge against Fascism?”

Callum Tilley, University of Cambridge,
“Politics Beyond the Nation-State: Hannah Arendt on Statelessness and World-Building”

Zeyu Du, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg,
“From Barbaric Fringe to Refuge Space: The Conceptual Transformation of “Overseas” (Haiwai) in the Modern Chinese Exile Imagination, 1898-1960s”

Vanessa Mader, University of Cambridge,
“Dwelling in the Anthropocene and German Anti-Progressive Thought in the 20th Century”

Drinks Reception (7:30pm – 8:30pm)

Generously funded by the Cambridge Centre for Political Thought