Researcher biography
- Degrees: BA Hons Class I (Monash); PhD (2018)
- Supervisors: Prof. Peter Harrison & Dr. Leigh Penman
- Thesis Working Title: Depraved Origins: Sin, The Fall, and the Origins of Society in Early Modern Political Thought
- Area of Research: I am researching the concept of the origins of society, and different conceptions of the formation of political society, in early modern political thought. I am focusing on the interplay between theological accounts of the Fall and the theoretical foundations of politics in thinkers whose ideas stem from the Protestant Reformations. Beginning with John Calvin and Johannes Althusius, I examine how thinkers more contemporary to the Reformations understood society to be a natural outworking of human nature, despite original sin. However, there is an observable change in the understanding of the origins of society in the seventeenth century, exemplified by Thomas Hobbes's and John Locke's ideas of the "state of nature" and the "state of war". My aim to is to understand how these changes came about within the same broad Protestant theological tradition.