Lecture Hannah Dawson: Early Modern Selfhood and the Case of Feminism

On Thursday 30 January, Hannah Dawson (King’s College London) will give the lecture ‘Early Modern Selfhood: The Case of Feminism’, as part of the Utrecht Lectures in Political History series. In this lecture, Dawson presents early modern selfhood from the perspective of women.

A feminist perspective on early modern selfhood

It is often said that a distinctive form of selfhood emerged in early modernity. The Reformation encouraged individuals to form a direct relationship with their maker. Religious persecution and strained efforts toward toleration created a space for privacy and subjectivity. Meanwhile, new scientific ideas turned the lights on in the theatre of the mind, where the newly constituted ego observed conscious ideas.

At the same time, political pressures caused people to reflect on their inherent freedom, dignity, and equality. Dawson offers an alternative story of early modern selfhood, one that approaches it from a radically different perspective: that of women. She argues that early modern feminists developed a critical theory of interiority, one that identifies its contingency, fragility, porosity, and punitive relationality.

About Hannah Dawson

Hannah Dawson teaches the History of Political Thought at King’s College London. She has published widely on early modern philosophy of language, and moral, political and feminist thinking. She is the author of Locke, Language and Early-Modern Philosophy (Cambridge University Press) and Life Lessons from Hobbes (Pan Macmillan).

Dawson is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing (Penguin), and, with Annelien de Dijn, co-editor of Rethinking Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge University Press). She is currently preparing her edition of Locke’s Disputations on the Law of Nature for the Clarendon Works of John Locke, and writing a book on the birth of feminism.