Dr. Ross Carroll

I am a political theorist and intellectual historian working on a range of themes including Enlightenment political thought, early abolitionist ideas, and the political thought of Edmund Burke. More recently I am also interested in multigenerational democracy and how it might be achieved. 

Before arriving at DCU in 2023 I taught for eight years at the University of Exeter in the UK (where I remain associate member of the Centre for Political Thought). I was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the College of William and Mary in Virginia for two years, having obtained my PhD in Political Science from Northwestern University in 2013 with a dissertation on the concept of fanaticism (or "enthusiasm") in Enlightenment political philosophy.  I was a Fulbright scholar in 2005-6.

My monograph Uncivil Mirth: Ridicule in Enlightenment Britain was published with Princeton University Press in 2021 and won the Morris D. Forkosch prize for the best first book in intellectual history. My second book, Edmund Burke, was published in 2024 as part of Polity's Classic Thinker series.

I am currently working on two main projects. The first is a book tentatively entitled For Posterity: Future Generations in Modern Political Thought. The second is a study of the impact of Burke's political ideas on Indian political thought before and after independence.