I'm a tenured assistant professor in political theory (UD1) at the University of Amsterdam, Dept. of Political Science, and an affiliated researcher in the Justice and Migration project at RIPPLE. Between 2009 and 2021, I worked at KU Leuven, Institute of Philosophy, funded by PhD and postdoctoral fellowships of the Research Foundation (FWO)-Flanders. In 2014, KU Leuven awarded me a PhD in philosophy (summa cum laude); I also hold degrees in philosophy (BA, MA), history (BA, MA), and political science (BA) from Leiden University.
My research specialisms are in seventeenth-century moral, legal, and political philosophy; contemporary theories of rights and property; and international legal and political philosophy (incl. the ethics of war and philosophy of human rights). Much of my work focuses on changing conceptualizations of notions such as ‘justice’, ‘rights’, ‘obligations’, ‘property’, and ‘sovereignty’. I am particularly interested in uncovering the conceptual and theoretical constraints past and present philosophers face when attempting to reinterpret received notions.
I have spent some time scrutinizing the works of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) – someone ‘very dexterous in Confuting others by putting a new Sense upon their words, rehearsed by himself, different from what the same Words signifie with other men’ (Wallace 1662: 154). A monograph entitled Hobbes on Justice is under contract with OUP. Together with Robin Douglass (KCL), I have edited the Cambridge Critical Guide to Hobbes’s On the Citizen. A founding member of the European Hobbes Society, I have convened the society’s first two biennial conferences (in 2016 and 2018).
I enjoy travelling and spending short spells abroad. Over the years, I have been a visiting student/researcher at the Universities of Yale, Oxford, Boston, Berkeley, Paris-1-Sorbonne/Panthéon, British Columbia, Pompeu Fabra, and London (Queen Mary and KCL).