Staff Profile

Biography

I am a political philosopher and historian of political thought. I completed my BA at Queen Mary, MA at UCL and PhD at Royal Holloway. I was the recipient of a Max Planck Society Fellowship in 2010-2014 and part of an interdisciplinary research team investigating cultural memory. At the same time I completed a doctoral dissertation on Tacitus’ Annales, applying post-Marxist critical theory to his writing of imperial sovereignty. From 2014-2017 I was a Research Associate at Royal Holloway, during which time I worked on several projects at the intersection of classics, philosophy and political theory, including a Special Issue of Foucault Studies journal. From 2017-2021, I held various positions in London (at RHUL, UCL and Birkbeck) with the exception of two wonderful years spent at the Department of Government, University of Essex, as Lecturer in Political Theory (2019-2021). At Essex I was also Academic Supervisor of the 'Democracy in Schools' project, a skills-based volunteering initiative aimed at improving the political literacy of young people in the UK. I joined Newcastle Philosophy in September 2021 as Lecturer in Philosophy. I am also Honorary Research Associate at RHUL until October 2024.

Research

My research has engaged with ancient and modern philosophy and political thought, in particular the work of Tacitus, Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben. I am interested, above all, in the concepts of sovereignty, authority and legitimacy, and how people have spoken and written about them. Current areas of interest, aside from the above, include: emergency politics and prerogative power; ancient and modern rhetoric; Critical Philosophy of Race.

Teaching

PHI1014: Introduction to Political Philosophy 

PHI3002: Continental Political Thought

PHI1013: Ancient Philosophy II: Aristotle and Beyond 

PHI9001: Philosophy MLitt Research Assignments (team-taught)

Administration

Staff Facilitator of the Student-Staff Committee (2021 - )

Senior Tutor (2022 - )

Contact Details

Email: shreyaa.bhatt@ncl.ac.uk

Office: 10.14 (10th Floor), Henry Daysh Building

Office hours: Mondays, 2-4pm and Tuesdays 1-2pm 

• Alston R, Bhatt S, ed. Foucault's Rome: Foucault and Roman Antiquity. Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School, 2017.
• Bhatt S. The Augustan Principate and the Emergence of Biopolitics: A Comparative Historical Perspective. Foucault Studies 2017, (22), 72-93.
• Bhatt S. Rhetoric and Truth: Tacitus, Rancière and Democratic Historiography. Helios: A Journal Devoted to Critical and Methodological Studies of Classical Culture, Literature and Society 2017, 43(2), 163-189.
• Bhatt S. Useful Vices: Tacitus’s Critique of Corruption. Arethusa 2017, 50(3), 311-333.
• Bhatt S. Exiled in Rome: The Writing of Other Spaces in Tacitus's Annales. In: Fitzgerald W: Spentzou E, ed. The Production of Space in Latin Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
• Bhatt S. Percennius. In: Pagan VE, ed. The Tacitus Encyclopedia. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2022. In Press.