Adam Thomas Coleman

My scholarly interests reside primarily within the spheres of intellectual history, the history of philosophy, and the historiography of these traditions. I am particularly interested in the genealogies of liberalism, conservatism, and republicanism in their eighteenth, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century contexts; the European Enlightenment and its manifold legacies, especially as these unfold in Ireland and Britain; Post-Kantian German philosophy; and the vagaries of post-Rawlsian Anglo-American political thought. The purpose of my doctoral dissertation, in resurrecting the hitherto marginalised and neglected nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish historian and philosopher W.E.H. Lecky through an examination of his oeuvre in relation to a series of overlapping debates about liberalism, democracy, and empire, is partly to demonstrate the potential dividends of integrating Irish history more concretely within the methodologies and concerns of contemporary intellectual history, but also to contribute to a general enterprise currently underway of critiquing, expanding, and renewing the liberal ‘canon’ in order to render this tradition more amenable to our own concerns and political circumstances.