People

Executive Committee

Select members of the Society serve on an Executive Committee responsible for overseeing the strategic direction of the ISH and its day-to-day governance.

Sarah Hutton 

President of the Society

University of York and Aberystwyth University

Sarah Hutton is Honorary Visiting Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of York, and Professor Emeritus of Aberystwyth University. She studied at New Hall, Cambridge, and the Warburg Institute, University of London. The main focus of her research is in early modern intellectual history, where her interests extend from history of philosophy, to the history of science, the history of medicine, and seventeenth-century literature. She has long been interested in the Cambridge Platonists and has pioneered research on women in early modern philosophy and science. Her principal publications are British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century (OUP, 2015) and Anne Conway, a Woman Philosopher (CUP, 2004). Other publications include Women, Science and Medicine (with Lynette Hunter), Newton and Newtonianism (with James Force) (Kluwer, 2004), Studies on Locke (with Paul Schuurman) (Springer, 2008). She has also edited early modern texts: Richard Ward’s Life of Henry More (Kluwer, 2000), Ralph Cudworth, A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality (CUP 1996), and The Conway Letters, a revised edition of Marjorie Nicolson’s 1930 original (OUP, 1992). She is a founding member of the editorial boards of The British Journal of the History of Philosophy and Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy. She has served on the board of management of The Journal of the History of Philosophyand is advisor to such projects as Project Vox and New Narratives in the History of Philosophy. She was for 25 years director of International Archives of the History of Ideas.

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).

Michelle Pfeffer 

Communications Director

University of Oxford

Michelle Pfeffer is a Prize Fellow (JRF) at Magdalen College, Oxford and a Teaching Associate in the History Faculty at the University of Oxford. She was previously a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at The University of Queensland, Australia. Her research explores the history of science, medicine, and religion in early modern Europe. Her PhD, awarded in May 2020, examined the lives and works of a series of lay people who denied the immortality of the soul in early modern England. She is currently working on two projects: the marginalization of astrology throughout the early modern period and an intellectual biography of the controversial theologian William Warburton. Her publications include “The Contribution of the Early Modern Humanities to ‘Disenchantment” in the Journal of Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft; “The Society of Astrologers (c.1647–1684): Sermons, Feasts and the Resuscitation of Astrology in Seventeenth-Century London” in The British Journal for the History of Science (2021); “Paganism, Natural Reason, and Immortality: Charles Blount and John Toland’s Histories of the Soul” in Intellectual History Review (2020). She has also recently published “The Pentateuch and Immortality in England and the Dutch Republic: The Confessionalisation of a Claim” in Beyond Ancients and Moderns, eds. Ian Maclean and Dmitri Levitin (2021). She is currently co-curating with the anthropologist David Zeitlyn a major exhibition at the Bodleian Library (opening 2024) on the practice of divination and astrology throughout history and across the globe.

Elias Buchetmann 

Early Career Representative

University of Rostock

Elias Buchetmann is Research Associate and Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Rostock. His first book Hegel and the Representative Constitution (Cambridge, 2023) reconstructs early nineteenth-century constitutional debates from a wide range of previously neglected source material and situates G.W.F. Hegel’s political thought in its immediate cultural and political context. His latest research pursues the cross-cultural history of women’s political thinking around 1800, focusing on radical thought and gender discourse between Britain and Germany. He studied at Oxford and London, taught European Studies at Maastricht University, received his PhD from the European University Institute in Florence and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Klassik Stiftung Weimar and the Gotha Research Centre of Erfurt University. He has published peer-reviewed articles in Hegel-Studien and History of European Ideas and convenes the ISIH online seminar Women in Intellectual 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.

Julie Davies 

University of Melbourne

Julie Davies completed her PhD at the University of Melbourne and published her first monograph Science in an Enchanted World: Philosophy and Witchcraft in the Work of Joseph Glanvill in 2018. This work untangles the intricate development of Glanvill’s Saducismus triumphatus (1681) and explores how Glanvill’s roles as theologian, philosopher and advocate for the Royal Society of London converged in its pages. Davies’s research interests include dialogues between religion, science, philosophy and culture with a particular interest in debates about witchcraft and the supernatural, the experimental method, nature and pre-Linnean botany. Julie is also a Research Assistant to Professor Charles Zika at the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions at the University of Melbourne. She was the recipient of an Australian Postgraduate Award and undertook a research fellowship at the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel. Recent publications include: “Botanizing at Badminton House” in Domesticity and the Making of Modern Science and “German receptions of the works of Joseph Glanvill” in the Intellectual History Review. She also published an edited collection: A World Enchanted: Magic and the Margins, with Michael Pickering.

Howard Hotson 

University of Oxford

Howard Hotson is Professor of Early Modern Intellectual History at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Anne’s College. His interests range widely over the histories of science, philosophy, religion, education, and communication in the early modern period, focusing especially on the traditions of further, general, and universal reformation emerging from central Europe in the periods before and during the Thirty Years War. The author, inter alia, of an intellectual biography of Comenius’s teacher, Johann Heinrich Alsted (OUP, 2000), and a survey of central European Reformed educational theory and practice (Commonplace Learning: Ramism and its German Ramifications, 1543–1630, OUP, 2007), he is currently directing an Oxford-based collaborative research project, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, entitled Cultures of Knowledge: An Intellectual Geography of the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters.

Michael Hunter 

Birkbeck College, University of London

Michael Hunter is Emeritus Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a Fellow of the British Academy. For many years his chief preoccupation was Robert Boyle: he is the principal editor of Boyle’s Works (with Edward B. Davis, 14 volumes, 1999-2000), Correspondence (with Antonio Clerucuzio and Lawrence M. Principe, 6 vols., 2001) and workdiaries (with Charles Littleton, available online). He is also the author of Boyle: Between God and Science (2009), which won both the Samuel Pepys Award and the Roy G. Neville Prize in 2011, and of Boyle Studies: Aspects of the Life and Thought of Robert Boyle (2015). His numerous other books deal with various aspects of seventeenth-century intellectual history, including the early Royal Society and its milieu. In 2017 he published The Image of Restoration Science: The Frontispiece to Thomas Sprat’s ‘History of the Royal Society’ (1667) (co-authored with Jim Bennett), which also reflects the concern with the visual culture of the period that led him to set up the website, British Printed Images to 1700. His latest book is The Decline of Magic: Britain in the Enlightenment (2020).

Stephen Gaukroger

University of Sydney

Stephen Gaukroger is Professor of History of Philosophy and History of Science, and ARC Professorial Fellow, at the University of Sydney. He was educated at the Universities of London and Cambridge, and has written on many aspects of early-modern intellectual history, with occasional forays into classical and medieval thought. He is the author of an intellectual biography of Descartes (OUP, 1995), and among his more recent books are: Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy (CUP, 2001), Descartes’ System of Natural Philosophy (CUP, 2002), Objectivity, A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2010), and Le monde en images. Voir, représenter, savoir, de Descartes à Leibniz (with Frédérique Aït-Touati: Garnier, forthcoming 2013). He has been engaged for some time on an examination of the emergence of a scientific culture in the West, and he is now at the mid-point of this project. Two volumes have already appeared: The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210-1685 (OUP, 2006), and The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680-1760 (OUP, 2010). The third volume, The Naturalization of the Human and the Humanization of Nature: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1750-1820 should be ready by the middle of the decade.