Dr Stephen Clucas

BA (Wales), PhD (Kent)
Reader in Early-Modern Intellectual History

020 7631 6075
s.clucas@bbk.ac.uk

I have been teaching at Birkbeck since 1991, and I currently teach on five degree programmes: BA Humanities, BA English, MA Renaissance Studies, MA Cultural and Critical Studies and MA History of Ideas.  Courses I have taught include: Magic, Science and Religion in the Renaissance; Renaissance philosophies and Renaissance literature; Renaissance Textualities; Aesthetics and Cultural Theory; Reading Walter Benjamin; Atheology and Unreason; The Cultural Production of Space; The Photographic and The Aphoristic.

I am the Editor (together with Stephen Gaukroger) of the journal Intellectual History Review and I am a member of the Council of the International Society for Intellectual History. In 2007 I organized the ISIH conference: 'Models of Intellectual History'. In 2004 I organized an international conference dedicated to the Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino: Laus Platonici Philosophi: Marsilio Ficino and his Influence. Since 1990 I have been Vice-Chairman of the Thomas Harriot Seminar (devoted to the life and times of the Elizabethan scientist and mathematician Thomas Harriot) and, since 2003, the organizer (together with Peter J. Forshaw) of the EMPHASIS seminar, held in the School of Advanced Study, University of London. I also serve on the Councils of the Society of the History of Alchemy and Chemistry and the Society for Renaissance Studies .

I would be interested in supervising PhD work on topics in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century intellectual history. I have particular expertise in the history of natural philosophy and the occult sciences (especially early modern matter theory, alchemy, magic, and the art of memory). I am also interested in general questions such as the formation of early-modern disciplines, the nature of early modern “scientific” discourses, the relationship between religious beliefs and early modern “science” or magic, etc. I would also welcome applications relating to the philosophical poetry of the English Renaissance (George Chapman, Fulke Greville, John Davies), and to any aspect of Renaissance commentary literature and marginalia. Recent PhDs I have supervised have included: Robert Boyle and the Organisation of Knowledge in the Seventeenth Century; Alchemy, Magic and Cabala in Heinrich Khunrath’s Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae; Biblical exegesis and interpretative strategies in early modern literary culture, and The early modern utopia, 1516–1650.

Current Research

I am currently working with Timothy J. Raylor of Carleton College, Minnesota on an edition of Thomas Hobbes's De corpore for the Clarendon Edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes.

In 2007-8 I was a Visitor at the School of Historical Studies at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton, and a University of London Research Fellow at the School of Advanced Study, University of London.