The Enlightenment Workshop is Oxford’s leading seminar in 18th-century intellectual history and literary culture. Convened by the Voltaire Foundation by Nicholas Cronk (St Edmund Hall) and Avi Lifschitz (Magdalen College), it usually takes place on Wednesdays throughout the academic year.
The seminars in 2024-25 are taking place in-person in the Sophia Sheppard Room and the Summer Common Room, Magdalen College (please refer to the programme for the respective venue).
Enlightenment Workshop 2024-25
We are delighted to present our programme for the academic year 2024-25. You can find a pdf version of the programme by following this link.
An interdisciplinary research seminar supported by the Faculty of History, the Faculty of Modern Languages, and the Voltaire Foundation
Wednesdays at 5:00pm unless stated otherwise
Michaelmas Term
16 Oct. Hans Erich Bödeker (Göttingen)
Reinhart Koselleck’s Enlightenment reconsidered
(Sophia Sheppard Room)
Followed by launch drinks for The Process of Enlightenment (2024) with the editors, Jonas Gerlings (Göttingen) and Ere Nokkala (Jyväskylä).
30 Oct. Darrin McMahon (Dartmouth College)
How revolutionary was equality in the 18th Century?
(Sophia Sheppard Room)
13 Nov. Roundtable on The End of Enlightenment (2023) by Richard Whatmore
Discussants: Sofia Sanabria de Felipe, Cameron Bowman, Joanna Innes.
Response: Richard Whatmore (St Andrews)
(Summer Common Room)
27 Nov. Lea Ypi (LSE)
Colonialism, cosmopolitanism and Kant’s justification of territorial rights (joint session with the Oxford Political Thought seminar)
(Summer Common Room)
Hilary Term
29 Jan. Colin Jones (Queen Mary, London / University of Chicago)
Robespierre speaks
(Summer Common Room)
12 Feb. Roundtable on The Enlightenment: An Idea and Its History (2024) by J. C. D. Clark.
Discussants: Caroline Warman, Jacob Chatterjee, John Robertson. Response: J. C. D. Clark
(Sophia Sheppard Room)
26 Feb. Tinca Prunea-Bretonnet (Bucharest)
Newton’s reception at the Berlin Academy
(Summer Common Room)
5 Mar. Jeanhyoung Soh (Seoul National University)
11:00am Montesquieu in East Asia (annual online session with the Global Intellectual History Unit, Sungkyunkwan University)
12 Mar. Pauline Kleingeld (Groningen)
Kant’s republicanism
(Sophia Sheppard Room)
Trinity Term
7 May Stefanie Stockhorst (Potsdam)
Bit-making and artisanal Enlightenment: the codification of practical knowledge from the pictorial rhetoric of bit-books to riding manuals and encyclopaedic knowledge
(Sophia Sheppard Room)
21 May Giora Sternberg (Hertford College, Oxford)
Writing acts and the family in the 18th Century: the Courtin-Brisay affair
(Sophia Sheppard Room)