Peter Stacey

Biography

I study European intellectual history from the medieval to the early modern period, and the principal focus of my research is the development of Renaissance political thought between the thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries. As an historian of the Renaissance, I am necessarily interested, too, in ancient Greco-Roman philosophy, politics and literature, and I have published work – on Roman political theory – in this field. But my main aim is to write about – and to help other students write about – the revival of the study of classical ideas and the way in which they came to inform intellectual life and political government in and around the Italian peninsula from approximately 1200 to 1600. My first book was about the impact of Seneca’s political philosophy upon Renaissance theories of monarchy; my second is about Machiavelli’s philosophy of the state.

Graduate advising and teaching

I currently act as the advisor of three PhD students enrolled in the Department, all of whom study various different aspects of intellectual history – theories of empire, concepts of representation, aspects of state formation – within my field. I also regularly serve on doctoral committees for students working in adjacent fields within the History Department and, more frequently, beyond it – in Classics, Political Science, Italian, Art History, Musicology, and English. As a consequence, my graduate research seminars are often attended by students from various different disciplines, even though the topics under investigation are pursued as questions of intellectual history.

Undergraduate teaching

I routinely teach undergraduate lecture courses in both the lower division (often in the GE Cluster course called ‘History of Modern Thought’) and in the upper division, where I offer classes on the intellectual and cultural history of the Renaissance (History 122a) and on the history of political thought from classical Athens to revolutionary France (a newly devised class: History 130). I also regularly offer a lower-division 97 seminar designed to introduce students to the discipline of intellectual history, and to exemplify how it has been practiced in order to make sense of one key text in early modern political philosophy – Thomas More’s Utopia (1516).