Welcome to the Humanities Initiative

Quentin Skinner is Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities at Queen Mary. He contributes to the teaching of the MA in the History of Political Thought and Intellectual History.

Professor Skinner was previously the Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge. His work has won him Fellowships of several academic Academies, including the British Academy, The American Academy and the Academia Europaea, and he has been the recipient of numerous honorary degrees, including degrees from Chicago, Harvard and Oxford. The author or co-author of more than 20 books, his works have been very widely translated, and his two-volume study, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, was named by the Times Literary Supplement in 1996 as one of the hundred most influential books published since the second world war. His scholarship has won him many prizes, including the Isaiah Berlin Prize of the Political Studies Association, the Lippincott and David Easton Awards of the American Political Science Association, in addition to the Wolfson Prize for History in 1979 and a Balzan Prize in 2006.

Professor Skinner's research interests include the intellectual history of early-modern Europe and political philosophy in the seventeenth-century, with a particular focus on the work of Thomas Hobbes. He is also interested in a number of more purely philosophical issues, such as the nature of interpretation and historical explanation, and in several topics in contemporary political theory, in particular the concept of political liberty and the character of the State. Amongst his main publications are The Foundations of Modern Political Thought , 2 vols (Cambridge University Press: 1978), Machiavelli (Oxford University Press: 1981), Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge University Press: 1996), Visions of Politics , 3 vols (Cambridge University Press: 2002), and Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge University Press: 2008).

Professor Skinner is co-editor, with Professor James Tully, of the Cambridge University Press series, Ideas in Context, in which over 80 volumes have been published. He is also co-editor, with Dr Raymond Geuss, of the Cambridge University Press Series, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, in which over 100 volumes have been published.