Samuel Tchorek-Bentall

I'm a historian of early modern political thought. My current research focuses on debates about the origins and purpose of human sociability, primarily in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. My PhD thesis is a study of the gradual shift that takes place in the early modern period from an idea of the political community as a place for the exercise of virtue to a concept of government as the basic condition of security and survival. I'm fortunate to be supervised by Prof. Annabel Brett. 

My own history informs my other interests. Before landing in Cambridge for an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History, I received a BA in classics as part of an individual interdisciplinary degree in the humanities and social sciences at the Jagiellonian University and an MA in classics within the same framework at the University of Warsaw. While living in Poland and attempting to come to terms with the legacy of the Second World War, communism, and the Shoah, I wrote extensively on twentieth-century Polish prose and Polish-Jewish relations.

I'm the current host of Interventions: The Intellectual History Podcast, a platform where leading historians of political thought can present their work to a general audience, and I’m also the convenor of the Graduate Workshop in Political Thought and Intellectual History, a place where budding scholars can discuss their research in a friendly environment.