Amy Chandran is a Assistant Professor of Humanities in the Hamilton Center. Chandran’s research spans historical and contemporary questions regarding sovereignty, power, obligation, freedom, religion, and the institutional underpinnings of democracy. More broadly she is interested in classical and early modern ideas of honor, authority, obedience, and legitimacy, as well as the psychological dynamics that mediate individual experiences of political agency and community. She has published articles in Modern Intellectual History, History of European Ideas and Hobbes Studies. Before coming to Hamilton, she was a College Fellow at Harvard University and lecturer at Brandeis University. She also worked as a policy adviser in Australia at the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.
Chandran’s current book project, Mortal God: The Religious Imagination and the Making of Leviathan, examines the writings of Thomas Hobbes, and especially his most famous work, Leviathan. Mortal God will re-evaluate Hobbes’s contributions to political concepts such as equality, representation, power and honor, in light of the historical and religious analysis offered in Leviathan’s second half.
‘A “Divine Lawgiver” for the Leviathan? The Commonwealth by Institution and the Case of the Prudent Prophet’, History of European Ideas (June 2024).
‘Transubstantiation, Absurdity and the Religious Imagination: Hobbes and Rational Christianity’, Hobbes Studies (May 2024), 1-31.
‘Hobbes in France, Gallican Histories and Leviathan’s Supreme Pastor’, Modern Intellectual History 20 (2023), 359–387A
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