People

The Directors of the Centre are Professor Duncan Bell, Professor Richard Bourke, Professor Annabel Brett and Professor Duncan Kelly. The Centre also draws on the expertise of the many scholars at Cambridge working on the history of political thought, political theory, and intellectual history. For further details see the webpage of the Political Thought and Intellectual History Subject Group.

Directors

Professor Duncan Bell (POLIS)

Professor of Political Thought and International Relations

Duncan Bell works on the history of nineteenth and twentieth century political thought, focusing in particular on British and American ideologies of empire and world order, as well as assorted topics in contemporary political theory and international relations.

He is the author of The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order (Princeton, 2007), Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire (Princeton, 2016), and  Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America (Princeton, 2020). His most recent book is Utopia (Oxford, 2025), co-written with Douglas Mao. He is currently writing a history of transhumanism.

Professor Richard Bourke (History)

Professor of the History of Political Thought

Richard Bourke's work has focused on the history of political thought, particularly on the political ideas of the enlightenment and its aftermath. He also has interests in ancient philosophy, and in political theory in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has written, in addition, on Irish history, above all on the Troubles. He has also published on various issues in contemporary political thought, ranging from nationalism and conservatism to political judgment and popular sovereignty. He is currently working on the philosophy of history since Kant, and on the history of democracy. 

His most recent monographs are Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke (Princeton, 2015) and Hegel’s World Revolutions (Princeton, 2023).

Professor Annabel Brett (History)

Professor of Political Thought and History

Annabel Brett specialises in the history of political thought in the late medieval and early modern periods, with a particular interest in natural law and the Aristotelian tradition. Topics of research include the concept of rights and the limits of obligation, nature and the environment, politics and space, the history of international law. She is the author of Liberty, right and nature: Individual rights in later scholastic thought (Cambridge, 1997) and Changes of state: nature and the limits of the city in early modern natural law (Princeton, 2011).

Professor Duncan Kelly (POLIS)

Professor of Politics

Duncan Kelly is interested in modern political and economic ideas, their intellectual history, and relatedly, how those histories might shed light on contemporary politics. His publications include The State of the Political (Oxford, 2003), The Propriety of Liberty (Princeton, 2010), Politics and the Anthropocene (Polity, 2019). His latest book is Worlds of Wartime: The First World War and the Reconstruction of Modern Politics (Oxford, 2025). 

Ongoing research and writing is focused on three main themes. (1) the relationship between artistic modernism and modern politics, especially around the First World War (2) the global political and economic thought of the period 1848-1914; and (3) various connections between wartime, politics, and environmental history, in the Anthropocene.