Dr Waseem Yaqoob

Profile

I am a historian of modern political thought and intellectual historian specialising in the history of ideas about politics, economics, race and international order in the twentieth century.

My first book, 'History and Judgment: The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt' is under contract with Princeton University Press. I am currently working on a project reassessing ideas of federation in the twentieth century.

Prior to joining Queen Mary in 2019 I was Lecturer in the History of Political Thought at the University of Cambridge, Randall-Dillard Research Fellow in Politics at Pembroke College, Cambridge, DAAD Visiting Fellow at Humboldt University, and Procter Visiting Fellow at Princeton University. I completed my PhD at the University of Cambridge, where I also did the MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History and a BA (Hons) in History.

Teaching

I convene or co-convene the following undergraduate modules:

HST4332: Foundations of Modern Thought: Introduction to Intellectual History

HST5440: History of Political Thought

HST4398: Totalitarianism: Authoritarian Politics in History and Theory, 1900 to the present

HST6775: Anticolonial Political Thought

At the postgraduate level I convene HST7703: Capitalism and Political Thought for the joint QM-UCL MA in the History of Political Thought and Intellectual History.

Research

Research Interests:

My first book, History and Judgment: The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt, offers a new interpretation of this influential philosopher as a fundamentally historical political thinker. Far from being an aloof émigré outsider, Arendt was engaged in and contributed to arguments about race, sovereignty, Marxism, automation, secularisation and revolution. Locating her in a transatlantic web of ideas from the Weimar era to the end of the Vietnam War, the book sheds fresh light on the intellectual history of this period.

My current book project reassesses ideas about federation from across the political spectrum in the twentieth century. Moving across the traditional breaking points of 1918 and 1945, it looks how the changing fortunes of democracy, the trajectories of empire and decolonisation, and economic and technological change transformed political thinking about the nature and possibilities of international and increasingly, global order.

Publications

‘After Historicism: The Politics of Time and History in Twentieth-Century Germany,’ in Time, History, and Political Thought, ed. John Robertson (Cambridge University Press, 2023), pp. 259-284.

‘Reconciliation and Violence: Hannah Arendt on Historical Understanding’, Modern Intellectual History 11 (2), 2014.

‘The Archimedean Point: Science and Technology in the Thought of Hannah Arendt, 1951-1963’, Journal of European Studies, 44 (2), 2014.

Supervision

• 20th C political thought and intellectual history, especially in the following areas:
• European political thought and intellectual history
• Anti-colonial political thought
• Anglophone political philosophy