Executive Committee
Select members of the Society serve on an Executive Committee responsible for overseeing the strategic direction of the ISIH and its day-to-day governance.
László Kontler
President of the Society
Central European University (Budapest/Vienna)
László Kontler is professor of history at Central European University (Budapest/Vienna). He has held fellowships and visiting professorships at Rutgers, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Florence, Göttingen and Wolfenbüttel. His research and publications focus on intellectual history, the history of political thought, translation and reception, and the production and circulation of scientific knowledge in early modern Europe, mainly the Enlightenment. His books include Kontler László: A History of Hungary | Atlantisz Könyvkiadó (1999/Palgrave, 2002), Translations, Histories, Enlightenments: William Robertson in Germany, 1760-1795 | SpringerLink (2014) and (with Per Pippin Aspaas) Maximilian Hell (1720–92) and the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe | Brill (2020). He edited (with Antonella Romano, Silvia Sebastiani and Zsuzsanna Borbála Török) Negotiating Knowledge in Early Modern Empires: A Decentered View | SpringerLink (2014), (with Mark Somos) Trust and Happiness in the History of European Political Thought | Brill (2017), (with Cesare Cuttica and Clara Maier) Crisis and Renewal in the History of European Political Thought | Brill (2021) and (with István Szijártó and Wim Blockmans) Parliamentarism in Northern and East-Central Europe in the Long Eighteenth Century (2022). László is a founding member and former president of the Europoliticalthought – Website of the European Society for the History of Political Thought, and co-editor of the series History of European Political and Constitutional Thought (Brill).
Diego Lucci
General Secretary
American University in Bulgaria
Diego Lucci is a Professor of Philosophy and History at the American University in Bulgaria and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He holds a PhD from the University of Naples Federico II and has also taught at Boston University and the University of Missouri St. Louis. He has held research fellowships at various institutions, including, among others, the University of Hamburg, Gladstone’s Library, and the Institute of Historical Research in London. He has lectured at a number of universities and institutes in Europe, the United States, and Australia. His research concentrates on the philosophy and intellectual history of the Age of Enlightenment, with a focus on English philosophical, political, and religious thought. He is the author of three books and over fifty journal articles and book chapters. He is also the co-editor of five volumes, among which are Atheism and Deism Revalued: Heterodox Religious Identities in Britain, 1650-1800 (Ashgate, 2014, with Wayne Hudson and Jeffrey R. Wigelsworth) and Philosophy, Religion, and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (special issue of the Journal of Early Modern Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, 2022, with Sorana Corneanu and Benjamin I. Goldberg). His first monograph is a study of the deists’ hermeneutics titled Scripture and Deism: The Biblical Criticism of the Eighteenth-Century British Deists (Lang, 2008). His most recent monograph is John Locke’s Christianity (Cambridge University Press, 2021), the first-ever comprehensive study of Locke’s religion. He has been the convener of various international conferences, including the 2017 Conference of the International Society for Intellectual History and the 2022 John Locke Conference, both held at the American University in Bulgaria.
Adam Sutcliffe
Treasurer
King’s College London
Adam Sutcliffe is Reader in European History at King’s College London, where he contributes to several MA programmes as well as to the intercollegiate University of London MA in the History of Political Thought and Intellectual History. He has a long-standing interest in Spinoza and his influence, and is currently working primarily on religious difference and radical politics in western Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and on the modern history of the idea of Jewish world historical purpose. He is the author of Judaism and Enlightenment (CUP, 2003), and the co-editor, most recently, of Philosemitism in History (CUP, 2011), and of two volumes which should appear shortly: The Cambridge History of Judaism, volume VII: The Early Modern World, 1500-1815 (CUP), and History, Memory and Public Life: The Past in the Present (Routledge).
Communications Director
Technische Universität Nürnberg (UTn)
Rodolfo Garau is a Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at the Institute for Liberal Arts & Sciences, University of Hamburg. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow at several institutions, including the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and Humboldt University of Berlin. More recently, Garau was an assistant professor (RTD-a) at the University Ca’ Foscari, Venice. His research interests focus on the history of philosophy, science, and the intellectual history of the early modern period. In particular, he has explored the history of the concept of conatus in the early modern period; the birth of empiricist epistemology with special attention to the figure of Gassendi. His latest research is dedicated to the history of cosmological debates in Catholic confessional contexts of the early modern period, and to the phenomenon of the marginalization of astrology from educational contexts between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Abigail Hayton
Early Career Representative
University of Notre dame
Abigail Hayton is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Theology at the University of Notre Dame. She holds a DPhil in Theology & Religion (Ecclesiastical History) from the University of Oxford. Her thesis, which forms the basis of her first book project, reveals the vast reception of the writings of Moses Maimonides in early modern England and its significance for the historicisation of theology. Her latest research pursues counter-Socinian engagement with Jewish scholarship across Europe during the long seventeenth-century. Her work has appeared in The Journal of Ecclesiastical History.
Thomas Ahnert
Editor, Intellectual History Review
University of Edinburgh
Thomas Ahnert is Professor of Intellectual History at the University of Edinburgh. He has published mainly on German and British, in particular Scottish, intellectual history from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. His first monograph was a study of the jurist and philosopher Christian Thomasius, Religion and the Origins of the German Enlightenment. Faith and the Reform of Learning in the Thought of Christian Thomasius (2006). This was followed in 2014 by a book on The Moral Culture of the Scottish Enlightenment, 1690 – 1805. With the late Susan Manning he co-edited a volume of essays on Character, Self and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment (2011), which was a product of a collaborative research project, directed by Susan Manning and Nicholas Phillipson, on the Science of Man in the Scottish Enlightenment. He has also translated and edited several seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century texts on natural law, including Thomasius’s Institutes of Divine Jurisprudence, with Selections from Foundations of the Law of Nature and Nations (2011). His current projects are a study of Newtonianism in the German lands from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, and a new history of the Scottish Enlightenment.
James A. T. Lancaster
Editor, Intellectual History Review
University of Queensland
Dr James A. T. Lancaster is an intellectual historian who received his PhD from the Warburg Institute, University of London. He is presently Lecturer in Studies in Western Religious Traditions in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry. Previously, he was a UQ Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland. As a member of the Editorial Board of the Oxford Francis Bacon critical edition, he has published widely on the philosophical and religious thought of Francis Bacon. His research and teaching interests and experience include the history of science and religion, the history of atheism and irreligion, and the history of the psychology of religion.
Richard Oosterhoff
Editor, Intellectual History Review
University of Edinburgh
Richard Oosterhoff is senior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, where he teaches early modern history and the history of knowledge. After a PhD at the University of Notre Dame, he took up a research position at CRASSH, University of Cambridge, where he was also a Fellow of St Edmund’s College. Dr Oosterhoff has published widely on early modern intellectual history. His first monograph was Making Mathematical Culture: University and Print in the Circle of Lefèvre d’Étaples (Oxford, 2018). One strand of research uses the lens of ingenuity to consider the intellectual and cultural frameworks of artisanal and artistic knowledge, which has led to a co-written monograph, Logodaedalus: Words Histories of Ingenuity in Early Modern Europe (Pittsburgh, 2018), and to an essay collection, Ingenuity in the Making: Matter and Technique in Early Modern Europe (Pittsburgh, 2021), co-edited with José Ramón Marcaida and Alexander Marr. More recently, Dr Oosterhoff has also been working on the history of knowledge in relation to early modern travel literature; with Anthony Ossa-Richardson he has translated Leo Africanus’ Cosmography and Geography of Africa, forthcoming with Penguin Classics in 2023.