Current/Future research activity
My current book on the liberal state centres upon the British state, but ranges over other examples, and includes colonial dimensions, especially in the case of India. The book has the provisional title, The Soul of Leviathan: Political Technologies of the Imperial-Liberal State. It covers the period from about 1830 to the First World War. The book draws on a number of disciplinary fields as well as history, including science studies and governmentality studies. It involves consideration of the material and ethical fashioning of bureaucracy, extending into work on elite pedagogy. This focuses on the content and material forms of education in the public school and the Oxbridge College. The research also concerns the material forms of state formation in terms of communication systems, in particular the history of the British Post Office (see my online CRESC working paper available on this site [
Download (518.1 KiB)]). My current research activities are therefore in the interdisciplinary, but especially historical, study of liberalism, governance and the state.
Growing out of this current work, I am planning a book on the theme of freedom and the British, which involves the systematic questioning of received understandings of both freedom and liberalism.
I am interested in urban history, and in Irish history, especially the history of the Irish in Britain.
I am involved as a research convener in the ESRC-funded Centre for the Study of Sociocultural Change (CRESC, see cresc.ac.uk). This entails collective work in the Centre research theme of liberalism, culture and governance, with a concentration on the material and ethical practices of government, states, cities and markets. The work involves new and forthcoming publications on a number of subjects (the special issue of Cultural Studies, 2008, on government, culture and liberalism is available online on this site [ Download (191.2 KiB)]).
As a separate activity, although linked to CRESC, along with Tony Bennett, Francis Dodsworth and Nikolas Rose I am running a series of five seminars over 2007-9, on the theme of “Government and Freedom”, funded by the ESRC. The programme is available on this site [ Programme (150.5 KiB)].
At the LSE I am developing these interests in the history of liberalism, freedom and governance in a collaborative and interdisciplinary way. “Understanding freedom” Programme for spring-summer 2009 available on this site [ Download (84.5 KiB)].
Research
