This year, on June 19-20, MA student Oksana Volovodiuk and PhD candidate Oana Avram presented at the 16th Annual London Graduate Conference in the History of Political Thought, which took place at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The theme of this year’s conference was “States and Space in the History of Political Thought.” The presenters engaged in critically investigating the role of the notions of space and states and their intersections in the history of political thought of various periods and local traditions.
Oksana presented her paper “Enlightened modernity, law, and order: Hugo Kołłątaj's views on instituting the Grand Duchy of Warsaw in the system of Napoleonic Europe.” In this paper, she examined the spatial notions in Hugo Kołłątaj's work “Notes on the present state of that part of the Polish land, which since the Peace of Tilsit came to be called the Duchy of Warsaw” (1808), in which the author constructs an image of the Napoleonic Europe as a united, well-ordered empire, justly ruled by the emperor Napoleon and his wise laws. At the same time, Kołłątaj dedicated to Poland a place in this system as the Eastern bastion of the European civilization/Empire, while emphasizing to his readers that the current Polish state, the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, will eventually be restored to the pre-partition borders of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Oana presented on "Mapping the State: Structuring Knowledge and Political Thought in Scipione Ammirato’s Writings". She has recently submitted her doctoral dissertation. Her PhD examines how "sixteenth-century humanists, particularly those who have been labeled by modern scholars as “second-rate” thinkers, have put to good use their editorial skills, and presented through their works their own understanding of civility, humanity, and foreign societies." Her research is supervised by Prof. Jan Hennings and Prof. Laszlo Kontler.