ICOG visiting research fellow: Shiru Lim

From February 2020 to February 2021, ICOG is joined by visiting research fellow Shiru Lim. Dr Lim is an intellectual historian and an Early Career Fellow at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg, the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Göttingen. She was previously a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence.

Dr Lim took her doctoral and bachelor’s degrees from University College London, and her master’s from the University of Cambridge. She works on the history of political, moral, and aesthetic thought in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. Shiru looks forward to taking her interests in history, political theory, and literary criticism further at the Centre for International Relations Research.

Research

My primary research interests might be articulated as the following two questions: 1) How was the relationship between philosophy, truth, and politics conceived? 2) What kinds, and how much artifice was seen to be necessary for the foundation, maintenance, and flourishing of civil society?

My current projects are three. The first is to complete the revision of my doctoral thesis into a monograph, on Philosophy and Government in Enlightenment Europe: Frederick II, Catherine II, and the philosophes. This work examines debates in eighteenth-century Europe concerning the idea of philosophical kingship, and shows how disagreements about how to do philosophy were equally conflicts about how to do politics.

The second and third projects stem from my more recent, post-doctoral research. There, I turn more squarely to the second of the aforementioned two overarching questions, that on artifice—that which is artificial, i.e. fabricated, fashioned, synthetic. In the first of these two projects, I take as my point of departure Friedrich Schiller’s Don Karlos (1787) and Giuseppe Verdi’s 1867 adaptation of it, arguing that in their dramatization of the erosion of Philip II’s grip over the Spanish Netherlands, these works cast light on the changing regimes of truth in which the political authority of monarchical government was rooted. In the second, I examine and interrogate various visions of civility in French writing about stage acting from the eighteenth century to the present. In so doing, I ask why we attach so much importance to civility, and if we do so at the expense of disagreement, dissent, and radical politics.

Visiting research fellowship programme

ICOG welcomes applications for visiting research fellowships from academics working in the fields of its five research centres. The duration of visits usually varies from a month to half a year. During this time, visiting research fellows are expected to work on their own research projects (ideally in collaboration with a scholar or an academic team from ICOG) and to participate in the events organised by ICOG.