Dr Peter Verovšek
Department of Politics and International Relations
Lecturer in Politics/International Politics
+44 114 222 1660
Full contact details
Department of Politics and International Relations
1.05
Elmfield Building
Northumberland Road
Sheffield
S10 2TU
- Profile
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Dr. Peter J. Verovšek is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Politics/International relations. He studied Government (high honors) and German as a undergraduate at Dartmouth College (AB 2006, summa cum laude). He then conducted research on the continuing effects of the memories of World War II in the politics of the former Yugoslavia as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar (2006-07), before receiving his MA (2008), MPhil (2010) and PhD (2013) in Political Science from Yale University.
After completing his doctorate, he spent three years as Lecturer on Social Studies at Harvard University (2013-16), where he also served as co-founder and co-chair of the European Union Study Group at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. He has also held appointments as a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities in Bad Homburg, Germany, at the Jean Monnet Foundation in Lausanne, Switzerland, and at the Normative Orders Cluster of Excellence at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
In 2019-2020 Peter will be on leave on a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship working on his new project on Jürgen Habermas as a public intellectual.
- Research interests
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Dr. Peter J. Verovšek is a critical social theorist interested in the interconnection between democracy, capitalism and the nation-state. Working within international political theory, his past work has focused on how socially mediated collective memories serve as resources for political innovation in the aftermath of broad historical ruptures.
Verovšek's book, "The Future of European Memory: Rupture and Integration in the Wake of Total War" (Manchester University Press, 2020) examines the role that the collective memories of the two World Wars played in the development of the European Union. He argues that the problems revealed during the Eurozone crisis can be traced to the fading of these memories, as the generations that understood the European Union as a moral project as a result of their experience of total war have passed away.
With the support of a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship Peter is currently starting a new project on Jürgen Habermas as a public intellectual. This new direction in his work will also address the changes associated with the structural changes in the public sphere associated with the rise of the internet and the demands of citizenship in a digital age. He is also working on a series of papers on Marx and Marxism.
- Publications
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Books
- Memory and the future of Europe. Manchester University Press.
- Memory and the Future of Europe Rupture and Integration in the Wake of Total War. University of Manchester Press.
Journal articles
- The moment of rupture: Historical consciousness in interwar German thought. Contemporary Political Theory. View this article in WRRO
- Injustice and the reproduction of history. By Alasia Nuti. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019.. Constellations. View this article in WRRO
- Caught between 1945 and 1989: collective memory and the rise of illiberal democracy in postcommunist Europe. Journal of European Public Policy. View this article in WRRO
- Habermas’s politics of rational freedom: Navigating the history of philosophy between faith and knowledge. Analyse & Kritik, 42(1), 191-218. View this article in WRRO
- Social criticism as medical diagnosis? On the role of social pathology and crisis within critical theory. Thesis Eleven. View this article in WRRO
- Capitalism and unfree labour : a review of Marxist perspectives on modern slavery. Review of International Political Economy. View this article in WRRO
- A Case of Communicative Learning?: Rereading Habermas’s Philosophical Project through an Arendtian Lens. Polity, 51(3), 597-627. View this article in WRRO
- Impure theorizing in an imperfect world: Politics, utopophobia and critical theory in Geuss’s realism. Philosophy and Social Criticism, 45(3), 265-283. View this article in WRRO
- Screening Migrants in the Early Cold War: The Geopolitics of American Immigration Policy. Journal of Cold War Studies, 20(4), 154-179. View this article in WRRO
- Historical criticism without progress: Memory as an emancipatory resource for critical theory. Constellations. View this article in WRRO
Chapters
- Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), The Cambridge Habermas Lexicon (pp. 485-487). Cambridge University Press
- Memory and the future of Europe. Manchester University Press.
- Research group
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I am eager to begin supervising students interested in nineteenth and twentieth century political theory, international political theory, critical theory, phenomenology and existentialism, transitional justice and the normative issues surrounding international migration and the European Union.
- Teaching activities
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Building on my education in the theoretical tradition of the Frankfurt School, I believe that my job as an instructor is to help students to find new ways to understand the world around them. I seek to achieve this by presenting my students with texts and historical examples that force them to reevaluate their assumptions. I encourage them to engage with the thinkers and ideas they encounter, so that they can become active partners in an intellectual conversation. As a critical theorist, I want them to see the concepts they are learning not as abstruse constructs, but as tools they can use to analyze their social and political environment.
I do not see teaching and research as separate spheres of academic life; on the contrary, my teaching interests flow directly from my research. In addition to modules in the history of political thought and twentieth century continental political theory, my teaching interests also include on collective memory and historical justice, normative European Union studies, globalization and the end of the nation-state, and international migration. I also look forward to working with students on research and thesis projects at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
- Professional activities
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- Research Grant, ARRS (Slovenian Research Agency), Slovenia
- Research Fellow, Jean Monnet Foundation for Europe, Switzerland
- Junior Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Germany
- DAAD Graduate Fellowship, Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany
- Fulbright Research Fellowship, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia