Political Science » Research » Peter Hallberg

Peter Hallberg

Eva Österberg Pro Futura Fellow, Associate Professor

E-mail: peter.hallberg@statsvet.su.se

Contact information »

Peter Hallberg is Eva Österberg ProFutura Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS). He became Associate Professor of Political Science at Stockholm University in 2010. He studied at Gustavus Adolphus College (B.A. Political Science) and Uppsala University (M.Sc., Political Science & French), before earning his Ph.D. in Political Science at Stockholm University in 2003. He has been a guest researcher at the University of Helsinki and was a STINT Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence, in 2003-04. He is presently a Guest Researcher at McMaster University, Canada.

Research interests

In his research, Hallberg works at the intersection of cultural history and political theory, with a particular focus on concepts and histories pertaining to the emergence of rights.

His work is interdisciplinary and frequently crosses the boundaries between the social sciences and the humanities, as evidenced by the diverse forums in which his research has been published, e.g. Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, Scandinavian Journal of History, History of European Ideas, History of Political Thought, Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift, and Race & Class.

Hallberg’s doctoral dissertation, Ages of Liberty: History Writing, Social Upheaval and the New Public Sphere, Sweden 1740-1792 (2003), is a study on the political uses of history, before and after the revolutionary period in Europe, as a means to advance human rights.

His current research revolves around the changing relationship, both diachronically and synchronically, between anthropology and political theorizing broadly understood. The extent to which new empirical knowledge, especially in transnational contexts, affected the ways in which political philosophy was conducted and how social problems were framed is still not well understood. The project attempts to make some contributions to that end by studying the problem in three contexts: the Classical one of Plato, the Renaissance one of Thomas More, and especially the Enlightenment one of Kant, Herder, and Rousseau.