Pärtel Piirimäe

Pro Futura Scientia Fellow, SCAS.
Associate Professor of History, University of Tartu

After studying history at the universities of Tartu and Göttingen, Pärtel Piirimäe received an
M.Phil. in the History of Political Thought and Intellectual History in 1999 and a Ph.D. in
History in 2007, both from the University of Cambridge. Between 2003 and 2006, he worked
as a Research Fellow in European History at St John’s College, University of Cambridge. Since
2006 he has been working at the University of Tartu.

His research field covers early modern political and moral thought, history of international law,
propaganda and the public sphere, and regional identities. He is the author of chapters in
Sovereignty in Fragments (Cambridge University Press, 2010); Exploring Cultural History (Ash-
gate, 2010); The Roman Foundations of the Law of Nations (Oxford University Press, 2010); The
Ashgate Research Companion to the Thirty Years' War (2014); European Regions and Boundaries
(2017). His publications also include articles in the Historical Journal, Trames, Journal of Early
Modern History, and Storia della Storiografia. He has co-edited The University of Tartu in the
Early Modern Academic World (2010), Baltic Regionalism (2012), and Die baltischen Kapitula-
tionen von 1710 ( 2014), and is the Editor of Ajalooline Ajakiri: The Estonian Historical Journal.

During his fellowship at SCAS, Piirimäe studies the discourses of international law and morality in
early modern Europe. He focuses on the formation of a Eurocentric conception of ‘the law of
civilized nations’, which replaced the universalist, natural law–based aspirations of seventeenth-
century international law scholars. He also examines the reception and development of natural
law and ius gentium ideas in Northern Europe.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2017-18.