Caroline Ashcroft is a Stipendiary Lecturer in Politics at Harris Manchester College. She completed her PhD at Cambridge, before undertaking a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Queen Mary University of London, where she also worked as a lecturer. She has taught at Oxford since 2023.
Teaching
Caroline teaches political theory and history of political thought, including Theory of Politics, Theory of Politics (prelims), Advanced Theories of Justice, Historiography: Tacitus to Weber, Political Thought: Plato to Rousseau, and Political Thought: Bentham to Weber.
Research
Caroline works across political theory and intellectual history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her current research focuses on how the relation between technology and politics has been understood by political thinkers, particularly within radical critiques of technology, and the development and evolution of the concept of the environment in environmental movements and political theory. She has also worked extensively on the political thought of Hannah Arendt, particularly around the themes of violence and power in politics.
Her forthcoming book explores the concept of ‘catastrophic technology’ in twentieth century thought, as that emerged in the work of many influential political thinkers: a profoundly critical idea of technology entangled with the apocalyptic fears engendered by the total wars of the twentieth century and a looming nuclear threat, which later became closely engaged with and by the nascent environmental movement.
Caroline’s current work focuses on understanding how ‘worldliness’ rethought in different ways in the modern era influenced the emergence and popularisation of the concept of the environment as a political idea from the 1960s and 1970s onwards, up to contemporary ideas and debates around the idea of the Anthropocene.
Publications
Catastrophic Technology in Cold War Political Thought (forthcoming, Edinburgh University Press, 2024).
‘The Discourse on Technology in Cold War Political Thought: Media, Modernity and Freedom,’ History of European Ideas 49:7 (2023), 1144-1160, https://doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2023.2171461.
‘From the German Revolution to the New Left: Revolution and Dissent in Arendt and Marcuse,’ Modern Intellectual History, 19:3 (2022), 835-858, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244321000263
Violence and Power in the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021).
‘From Resistance to Revolution: the Limits of Nonviolence in Arendt’s “Civil Disobedience,”’ History of European Ideas, 44:4 (2018), 461-476, https://doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2018.1473960
‘The Polis and the Res Publica: Two Arendtian Models of Political Violence,’ History of European Ideas, 44:1 (2018), 128-142, https://doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2016.1234968
‘Jewishness and the Problem of Nationalism: A Genealogy of Arendt’s Early Political Thought,’ Modern Intellectual History, 14:2 (2017), 412-449, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244315000153
