The target is to establish this growing research direction at AU, drawing on the PI’s long-established international networks as a leading scholar in gender and political thought, and to build new connections in strong cooperation with AU scholars, thereby strengthening AU’s expertise in the fields of body-, global and gender history of ideas. We want to establish a strong and innovative research group positioned for a major grant application in 3 years with the aim of studying the history of the body and the material over an even longer period of time up until the 21^st century.

• understand the material and bodily foundations of early modern political thinking
• understand the historical relationship of abstract ideas (the state; liberty; laws) to concrete matter (flesh, sex; birth, death) in politics
• address a gap in research in history of ideas
• understand early modern relationships of the local to the global and the national to the international through material and bodily considerations
• widen what is considered the “source corpus” in the history of ideas from “great thinkers” to medicinal treatises and travel literature (“lower” literature)
• enrich the field through a global perspective
• enrich the field through a gender perspective