Academic biography

I am a political theorist working on a range of themes including political satire, the political thought of Edmund Burke, and the history of abolitionism. More recently I am also interested in how the interests of future generations can be represented in democratic politics. I have a BA in politics and philosophy from University College Dublin (2003), a Msc in International Relations from the London School of Economics (2004), and a PhD in Political Science from Northwestern University in Illinois (2013). I was a Fulbright scholar in 2005-6 and from 2009 to 2012 I served as Assistant Editor of Political Theory: an International Journal of Political Philosophy. 

Before arriving at DCU in 2023 I taught for two years at the College of William and Mary in Virginia and for eight years at the University of Exeter in the UK. My monograph Uncivil Mirth: Ridicule in Enlightenment Britain was published with Princeton University Press in 2021 and won the Morris D. Forkosch prize for the best first book in intellectual history. My second book, Edmund Burke, was published in 2024 as part of Polity's Classic Thinker series.