Photo credits:
Mikael Wallerstedt

Christopher Meckstroth

Pro Futura Scientia Fellow, SCAS.
Senior Lecturer on the History of Political Thought, University of Cambridge

Chris Meckstroth studied history, philosophy, and political theory at Harvard University before taking
his PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 2010. His PhD was supported by the
Mellon Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies, and he spent a year on exchange
at Sciences Po Paris, while conducting research at the Bibliothèque Nationale. After receiving his
degree, he returned to Harvard, where he lectured for three years in the programme on Social Studies.
In 2013, he took up a post as Lecturer on the History of Political Thought in the History Faculty, Uni-
versity of Cambridge, and was made Senior Lecturer in 2017.

Meckstroth’s work has combined the history of democracy and democratic thought with a particular
focus on nineteenth-century German and French political philosophy, as they developed alongside
reflection on the new types of popular politics unleashed by the French Revolution. His first monograph,
The Struggle for Democracy: Paradoxes of Progress and the Politics of Change, was published by
Oxford University Press in 2015. His articles have appeared in journals including Constellations; Political
Theory;
and The American Political Science Review. He is co-editor, with Samuel Moyn, of the third
volume of The Cambridge History of Democracy, which covers the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
and is currently under contract with Cambridge University Press.

As a Pro Futura Fellow, Meckstroth will be working on a project on ‘The Invention of International Order:
A History and Theory of General Peace Treaties, c. 1500-1914’, which examines several centuries in the
uneven development of a distinctively modern kind of federal approach to establishing order out of anarchy
and the ruins of war.


This information is accurate as of the academic year 2022-23