Rate My Professor Duncan Kelly

Duncan Kelly is Professor of Politics in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge, a position he assumed on 1 July 2025, and Fellow of Jesus College. He previously held the title of Professor of Political Thought and Intellectual History from 2018 to 2025. Kelly obtained a BA Hons from Glasgow Caledonian University, an MA from the University of York, and a PhD from the University of Sheffield. He began his academic career at the University of Sheffield, where he was British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow from 2000 to 2003, Lecturer from 2003 to 2005, and Senior Lecturer from 2005 to 2007. In 2007, he moved to Cambridge as University Lecturer in Political Theory and Fellow of Jesus College, advancing to University Senior Lecturer from 2009 to 2014, Reader in Political Thought from 2014 to 2018, and his subsequent professorial appointments. He currently serves as Deputy Head of Department in POLIS and Director of Studies for the Harvard Exchange at Jesus College.

Kelly's research specializations lie in intellectual history and political theory, particularly concerning the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. His academic interests include the relationship between artistic modernism and modern politics around the First World War, global political and economic thought from 1848 to 1914, and connections between wartime, politics, and environmental history in the Anthropocene. Key publications comprise Worlds of Wartime: The First World War and the Reconstruction of Modern Politics (Oxford University Press, 2025), Politics and the Anthropocene (Polity Press, 2019), The Propriety of Liberty: Persons, Passions and Judgement in Modern Political Thought (Princeton University Press, 2011), Lineages of Empire: The Historical Roots of British Imperial Thought (edited, Oxford University Press, 2009), and The State of the Political: Conceptions of Politics and the State in the Thought of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Franz Neumann (Oxford University Press, 2003). He has published articles such as 'Malthusian Moments in the Work of John Maynard Keynes' in the Historical Journal (2020), 'Carl Schmitt on the Theory and Practice of Occupation and Dictatorship' (2021), 'Wartime for the Planet?' in the Journal of Modern European History (2022), and forthcoming works including 'Anthropocene Boundaries and Planetary Political Thinking' in the Cambridge Journal of Law, Politics, and Art (2025). Kelly has also contributed chapters to volumes like the Oxford Handbook of Populism (2017) and the Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt (2017).