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Richard Bellamy (philosopher)

British political philosopher

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Career

Bellamy was educated at Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School and the Lycée des Nations La Châtaigneraie. He read History at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he held a college scholarship, graduating with a ‘First’ and the Charles Crawley Prize in 1979. Afterwards, also at Cambridge, he did a PhD on ‘Liberalism and Historicism: History and Politics in the Thought of Benedetto Croce’ under the supervision of Quentin Skinner, during which time he spent two years as a researcher at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence from 1980–82. He completed his PhD in 1983. After a year teaching at the University of Pisa from 1982–83, he went on to a Junior Research Fellowship at Nuffield College, Oxford from 1983–86, where he was Junior Dean from 1984–86, and started the Nuffield Workshop in Political Theory, giving the first paper on 'Sex, Sin and Liberalism'. He was also Lecturer in the House of Politics at Christ Church from 1984–86. He was a Fellow and College Lecturer in History at Jesus College, Cambridge and Lector in History at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1986–88. He left for a Lectureship in Politics at the University of Edinburgh from 1988–92, and then held Chairs at the Universities of East Anglia from 1992–95, Reading from 1995–2002, and Essex from 2002–05. He has been at University College London since 2005, where he was the founding Head of the Political Science Department 2005–2010.

Richard Bellamy was Academic Director of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) from 2002 to 2006 and Founding Chair of the Britain and Ireland Association for Political Thought from 2008 to 2013. He was seconded to the EUI as Director of the Max Weber Programme from 2014 to 2019 and to the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin as Visiting Professor of Ethics and Public Policy from 2022 to 2024. He has also held Visiting Fellowships at Nuffield College, Oxford; the EUI; Australia National University (ANU); the Centre for Advanced Study (CAS) in Oslo; and the Hanse Wissenschaft-Kolleg (HWK) in Delmenhorst.

Bellamy has published 12 monographs, 30 (co-)edited volumes, over 90 journal articles and more than 80 book chapters. He has also edited translations of texts by Beccaria, Bobbio and Gramsci. His own writings have been translated into French, German, Arabic, Italian, Japanese, Persian, Chinese, Indonesian, Portuguese, Czech, Turkish, and Spanish.

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