Dr Emma Stone Mackinnon

Emma is an Official Fellow, and one of our Teaching Fellows in History. At Emmanuel, she is a Director of Studies for students studying the History and Politics and the History and Modern Languages joint courses. She is also one of our Tutors and a Financial Tutor. At the University, she is Assistant Professor in the History of Modern Political Thought in the Faculty of History.

Biography

I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and did my undergraduate studies at Harvard, where I concentrated in Social Studies. Before graduate school, I lived in New York City and in Washington, DC, working for four years at a political communications firm and for one year at a social policy research organization. My teaching and research is in contemporary political theory and the history of political thought, with broader research interests in histories of human rights and humanitarianism, anticolonialism, international political thought, and the relationship between history and politics. I came to Cambridge from the University of Chicago, where I completed a doctorate in Political Science. I arrived in 2017 as a Junior Research Fellow at Emmanuel; as of January 2020, I took up a university lectureship in the History Faculty, and became an Official Fellow of the College.

Teaching

At Cambridge, I lecture in and co–convene 'Political Philosophy and the History of Political Thought Since c. 1890' (History Part II Paper 5 / POL 11). I supervise for that paper, as well as 'The Modern State and its Alternatives' (POL 1) and 'The History of Political Thought from c.1700 to c.1890' (History Part I Paper 20 and Part II Paper 4/ POL8 and POL10). I also teach and supervise PhD students in History and MPhil students in the MPhil programs in Political Thought and Intellectual History. At Emmanuel, I normally direct studies for students in the History and Politics and the History and Modern Languages joint triposes, and am a tutor in the College.

Research

My current book projects concern the legacies of the eighteenth–century French and American rights declarations in mid–twentieth century politics of race and empire, and are focused on the politics of what I describe as human rights promises. The first focuses on debates over the meaning of the American founding and the nature of American ‘hypocrisy’ in debates over race and rights in the mid–twentieth century US. The second looks at struggles from the 1940s through the 1960s over French imperialism in Algeria, and the relationship between decolonisation, self-determination, and human rights.

My work has been published in Political Theory and Humanity, and in the volumes Time, History, and Political Thought (CUP 2023), The Blackwell Companion to Arthur Danto (Wiley Blackwell 2022), and Contingency in the Course of International Law (OUP 2021), and is forthcoming in Volume 5: The Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries of The Cambridge World History of Rights (CUP). My PhD dissertation, 'Imperial Promises: The Contested Politics of Human Rights in the Twentieth Century', won the 2018 Richard Saller Dissertation Prize for best dissertation that year from the University of Chicago Social Sciences Division.