Conferences and Talks
Below you can find short summaries of my most recent conference presentations and invited talks.
April 2023 Library of Congress Kluge Center Fellow Work in Progress Talk:
‘The Development of the Pennsylvania Council of Censors and the Debate on the Separation of Powers in the Revolutionary Atlantic’
Invited presentation at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress at the end of a three month research fellowship. I presented on the development of an elected constitutional guardian created by Pennsylvania's revolutionary Constitution of 1776, presenting a new account of its origins based on original archival research conducted at the Library.
December 2022 International Society for Intellectual History ECR Workshop,‘Autocracy, Revolution, and Republicanism (1789-1945)’:
‘Monarchic Republicanism or Republican Empire? Pierre-Louis Roederer and the Political Thought of the Consulate’
Conference paper presented to an ISIH Early Career Workshop. My paper explored the evolution of French Revolutionary attitudes towards monarchy through the writings of Pierre-Louis Roederer, famous as the only man to be with Louis XVI at the end of his reign and with Napoleon Bonaparte at the beginning of his. The paper explored how Roederer evolved from a constitutional monarchist in 1789, to a republican in 1791, and back to the leading advocate of Napoleon's coronation as Emperor in 1802.
October 2022 Populist Constitutionalism Project (Aristotle University) ‘Populism and Constitutionalism: Historical perspectives’ Workshop:
‘Preserving the people’s constitution? The Pennsylvania Council of Censors and the populist constitutionalism of the early American Revolution’
Paper presented at a two day workshop hosted by the 'PopCon' project at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki on the populist constitutionalism of Thomas Paine and the authors of the Pennsylvania Constitution.
May 2022 LSE Political Theory Graduate Conference:
‘Democracy, neutrality, and the crisis of constitutionalism: Benjamin Constant and Carl Schmitt on the possibility of a republican Pouvoir Neutre’
Conference paper on the relationship between Benjamin Constant and Carl Schmitt, with a particular focus on their competing attempts to create republican institutions capable of arbitrating institutional conflict without the threat of depoliticisation. The paper explored the uses and limits of the idea of a Pouvoir Neutre or 'moderating power' in 21st-century constitutional debates.
April 2022 Cambridge Political Thought and Intellectual History Graduate Workshop
‘The Separation of Powers without Checks and Balances? Constitutional Guardians and popular constitutional control in the revolutionary Atlantic’
This paper explored the influence of the Council of Censors established in Pennsylvania in 1776 in Revolutionary France. It presents an alternative theory of constitutionalism and separation of powers to the ascendant system of checks and balances in the revolutionary Atlantic world in the 18th-century.
June 2021 London Graduate Conference in the History of Political Thought
‘The Abbé Sieyès on Emergency Powers and Constitutional Guardianship’
This paper reinterprets the Abbé Sieyès' 1795 proposal for a 'Constitutional Jury' as a theory of emergency power. It argues that Sieyès saw the creation of independent institutions of constitutional arbitration as the means to institutionalise and regulate a state of exception during constitutional crises.