The winner of the BIAPT early-career prize is Dr Emily McTernan, who is Associate Professor at University College, London. Since defending her PhD – at the University of Cambridge – in 2013, Dr McTernan has established herself as one of the most innovative and original early-career scholars working in contemporary political philosophy. Her research – much of which focuses on the meaning and implications of political equality – cuts across disciplinary boundaries, combining the rigorous philosophical analysis of moral and political concepts with attention to the methods and arguments found in the contemporary social sciences, including sociology and psychology.

Unlike much of the philosophical literature devoted to the concept of equality, Dr McTernan’s work looks beyond the juridical role of laws and institutions, to consider instead the significance of norms and practices in facilitating and maintaining a genuinely social and relational egalitarianism. Her research has thus contributed not only to existing debates, but has also generated new discussions, by focusing normative philosophical attention on oft-ignored social and political concepts, such as microaggressions. The publication of her writing in first-rank journals – such as Philosophy & Public Affairs and The Journal of Political Philosophy – and its support through competitive funding awards – by various bodies, including The Leverhulme Trust and the Templeton Religion Trust – attest to its significance and international recognition. In her forthcoming monograph, Dr McTernan develops her work on social equality further, to advance a pioneering conceptual account – and robust normative defence – of the phenomenon of ‘taking offence’. Therein, McTernan contends, we should understand taking offence, under appropriate conditions, as a civic virtue rather than a vice, as an emotion that embodies the resistance of social inequalities within a community.

As well as her highly original contributions to research in political theory, the BIAPT judges were very impressed by Dr McTernan’s excellence in teaching, demonstrated both by the testimonies of her departmental colleagues at UCL and the overwhelmingly positive feedback provided by her undergraduate and postgraduate students. The judges also appreciated her commitment to the political thought community, and her valued role as one of the academic convenors of the 2019 BIAPT annual conference.

In response to her award, Dr McTernan said ‘I am honoured and delighted to receive this prize. I am deeply grateful to the many colleagues who have encouraged and supported the work that led to this award’.

The judges are delighted to award the Britain and Ireland Association for Political Thought’s 2021 Mid-Career Prize to Dr Humeira Iqtidar. One of the most exciting developments in the field in recent years has been the emergence and consolidation of comparative political theory, and Dr Iqtidar has been a central figure in this enterprise in London and beyond, combining a genuine interdisciplinarity in her scholarship—the use of ethnography in her research stands out—with a proven ability to get her work published in the leading journals on both sides of the Atlantic, both general journals of political science and specialist political theory journals, including Political Studies, the European Journal of Political Theory, the Journal of Politics, and Political Theory.

Dr Iqtidar studied at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad and McGill University in Montreal before coming to Cambridge, where she wrote her doctoral thesis at Jesus College and was elected a Junior Research Fellow at King’s. In 2011 she became Lecturer in Politics at King’s College London, being promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2015 and Reader—her current post—in 2019. Dr Iqtidar’s research speaks to a number of academic audiences in South Asian studies, Sociology, religious studies, and comparative political thought. Her monograph, Secularizing Islamists? Jama’at-e-Islami and Jama’at-ud-Da’wa in Urban Pakistan (Chicago, 2011) showcases the use of anthropological methods, with a striking dual argument at its core, that not only that Islamism an innovation in Islamic thought that emerged as a creative and oppositional response to colonial secularism, but also that, despite the Islamist critique of secularism, Islamists are inadvertently supporting the secularisation of society in terms of facilitating a qualitatively different imagination of religion. She has also co-edited with Tanika Sarkar a collection on Tolerance, Secularization and Democratic Politics in South Asia (Cambridge, 2018), and she has continued to work on questions related to toleration and justice in recent Islamic thought, with due attention to the discursive effects of colonialism and its legacies, always working to broaden the range of sources we use for the serious study of political thought, in particular mining sources that have often been historically overlooked.

In addition to her excellent scholarship and her teaching of comparative political theory, she is also a fine citizen of the broader research community, having founded the London Comparative Political Theory Group and sponsored the use of imaginative research methods through her work for the London Interdisciplinary Social Science Doctoral Training Programme, as well as making significant editorial contributions. Dr Iqtidar is therefore a thoroughly deserving winner of the second BIAPT Mid-Career Prize.

In response to her award, Dr Iqtidar said ‘I am delighted to accept the BIAPT Mid-Career prize. BIAPT has long provided an exciting intellectual space for political theorists, particularly through its annual conference, and I am deeply honoured to be associated with it’.

Britain and Ireland Association for Political Thought conference, 6th-8th January 2022 – St Catherine’s College, University of Oxford, UK and/or on line – arrangements to be confirmed.Academic Convenors: Adrian Blau (King’s College London), Ben Holland (Nottingham), and Marie Moran (University College Dublin). Conference Convenors: Gary Browning (Oxford Brookes) and Elizabeth Frazer (Oxford).

The academic convenors would be happy to receive proposals for panels consisting of 3-4 papers: up to 750 words to describe and justify the panel, including names of participants, and, if necessary, up to 300 words for each individual paper.  We are extending the deadline for receipt of these to 11.59 pm June 20 2021.  Please submit proposals to conference@associationforpoliticalthought.ac.uk.

The Britain and Ireland Association for Political Thought wholeheartedly supports the student-led campaign to convince Kingston University to abandon plans to close its undergraduate programmes in Politics, International Relations, and Human Rights. The Politics department is home to world-class research in political theory and other areas and BIAPT believes that the university should make a commitment to its excellent staff by continuing to recruit future students to these programmes.

The student petition to ‘Save Kingston Politics Department’ can be found here.

The Political Studies Association and British International Studies Association have also made a joint statement condemning the university’s decision to suspend recruitment.

The Political Thought Conference 2021 – in part – will be held on line, January 7&8 2021.  We will soon be launching registration for the following sessions:

Thursday Jan 7 11 a.m. The Politics and Ethics of Autonomy, convenor Kate Townsend, Exeter;

Thursday Jan 7 1330 Early Modern Histories of Civilization:  A Cross-Cultural Enquiry, convenor Leigh Jenco LSE

Thursday Jan 7 3 p.m. First Book Workshop: The politics of misery: Political agency and the medicalization of negative emotions, Dan Degerman, Bristol, author; Mihaela Mihai,  Edinburgh, Chair;

Friday Jan 8 a.m. – p.m. The Intellectual History of Liberal Catholicism in Europe c. 1789-1922, Convenor: Aude Attuel-Hallade, Sorbonne;

Friday Jan 8, a.m.-p.m. Race and Political Theory I: Historical perspectives, II: US Perspectives, III: contemporary and comparative perspectives Convenor: Adrian Blau KCL

The judges were so impressed by the strength and depth of the candidates under consideration for the inaugural 2020 Early Career Prize of the Britain and Ireland Association for Political Thought that they voted to make two awards, to Dr Teresa Bejan of the University of Oxford and to Dr Paul Sagar of King’s College London.

Teresa Bejan is Associate Professor of Political Theory at Oxford, where she is Tutorial Fellow in Politics at Oriel College. She did her BA in Chicago (2006), her MPhil at Cambridge (2007) and her PhD in the Department of Political Science at Yale. The dissertation was completed in 2013. It won the Leo Strauss Award from the American Political Science Association in 2015, and a version of it was published by Harvard as Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration in 2017. After Yale, she was Mellon Research Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia and Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto-Mississauga, before moving to Oxford in 2015.

Dr Bejan is chiefly a historian of political thought whose focus is on the seventeenth century in Britain and America, but she is also a political theorist involved in contemporary conversations about toleration and freedom of expression. She regularly speaks to a wider public, whether through her TED Talk, viewed over 1.5 million times, on whether civility is a sham, or her op-ed in the New York Times on ‘What Quakers can teach us about the politics of pronouns’. She is confident writing about the central figures in our field—Hobbes and Locke—as she is about less familiar thinkers—Roger Williams and Mary Astell—and her current projects, whether writing her book First Among Equals: The Practice and Theory of Early Modern Equality (under contract with Harvard University Press) or editing the papers from the recent conference on ‘the historical Rawls’, show her continuing to work fruitfully where political philosophy and intellectual history overlap.

Teresa Bejan is a lively and energising presence in the discipline, a fantastic advertisement for the serious study of political ideas, and a deserving joint winner of the inaugural Early Career Prize from the Association for Political Thought.

The judges were so impressed by the strength and depth of the candidates under consideration for the inaugural 2020 Early Career Prize of the Britain and Ireland Association for Political Thought that they voted to make two awards, to Dr Teresa Bejan of the University of Oxford and to Dr Paul Sagar of King’s College London.

Paul Sagar is Lecturer in Political Theory in the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London. He did his BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Balliol College, Oxford (2008), before studying for an MA in Political Thought and Intellectual History at Queen Mary University of London (2010) and writing his PhD in History at King’s College, Cambridge. That 2014 PhD became his book, The Opinion of Mankind: Sociability and the Theory of the State from Hobbes to Smith, which was published by Princeton in 2018. Sagar was elected to a Junior Research Fellowship, also at King’s, Cambridge, and worked there until moving to the other King’s at the start of 2018.

Dr Sagar is a very productive scholar indeed. He has already published over a dozen articles in leading journals, together with a steady stream of book reviews, and has completed the draft of his second monograph, Adam Smith Reconsidered: History, Commerce, and the Foundations of Modern Politics. In addition to the quantity and quality, the range of his scholarship is similarly striking: he works in the history of political thought, of course, but is also involved in a range of debates in contemporary political theory, especially but not only around ‘realism’, arguing that the eighteenth century’s questions are still very much our questions and that the best political thinking still has much to learn from the past masters of the Scottish Enlightenment. Earlier this year, he appeared on the BBC’s quiz show Mastermind, his special subject being ‘the life and works of Adam Smith’.

Paul Sagar is an inexhaustibly energetic and tremendously impressive scholar and teacher, and the Association for Political Thought is delighted to make him the joint winner of its inaugural Early Career Prize.

The Britain and Ireland Association for Political Thought is delighted to announce that the winner of the inaugural Mid-Career Prize is Dr Matt Sleat (Reader in Political Theory at the University of Sheffield).

Since defending his PhD at the University of York in 2006, Dr Sleat has made an enormously valuable contribution to political theory through his research and teaching, as well as a leading role in the professional community. His work has made a significant and distinct intellectual mark on the field, by revitalising the tradition of political realism and through a specific articulation of his own realist theory. Through argument that is both rigorous and creative, Dr Sleat’s monograph Liberal Realism (Manchester University Press, 2013) provides a theoretical reconciliation of a realist framework with substantive liberal normative commitments. His deft argument rejects what he sees as a false dichotomy of pure realism (where might makes right) versus a moralism that assumes consensus is straightforwardly achievable in politics. His contrary thesis is that a realist framework – one that views legitimacy as the primary political value – can support liberal values and institutions that take seriously both the inevitability of conflict and the importance of freedom and equality for citizens. Over the last ten years, realism has occupied a central place in debates within contemporary political theory and its prominence is in large part due to Dr Sleat’s energetic advocacy.

Dr Sleat is also an inspiring lecturer, supervisor, and mentor. In 2012, he won a Senate Award for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Sheffield, where he convenes a range of Politics modules. These include modules on advanced topics (for finalists and postgraduates) such as ‘Global Justice’, ‘The Rights of War and Peace’, ‘Liberalism and its Critics’, as well as core components of the Politics degree, such as ‘Modern Political Thought’ and ‘Contemporary Political Theory’. In addition to his teaching, Dr Sleat has recently served as Deputy Head of Department and the Director of Research for Politics at Sheffield.

The APT judges were particularly appreciative of Dr Sleat’s contribution to the discipline and huge professional service. His editorial work at European Journal of Political Theory raised its profile significantly as a venue for excellent work across the field and, more recently, he has been co-editor of the Political Studies Association’s flagship journal, Political Studies. Dr Sleat’s intellectual interests are refreshingly broad and his expertise cuts across different traditions within political theory, including international relations and the history of political thought.