Aminah Hasan-BirdwellAssistant Professor
Education
- PhD, Pennsylvania State University, 2016
- MA, Pennsylvania State University, 2012
- BA, Hampshire College, 2008
Current Work
My research focuses on marginalized figures in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy and their contributions to issues of ontology, political thought, and ethics, while shedding light on the presence of racialist and misogynistic ideas in the philosophical canon. I am completing a book, Early Modern Women on War and Peace, that treats early modern women philosophers’ ethical and political responses to the Thirty Years’ War and the English Civil War, as well as their challenges to dominant thinkers such as Grotius, Hobbes, and others.
In addition, I am working on a second project examining concepts of natural law in the thought of Ottobah Cugoano and other Black abolitionist thinkers of the eighteenth century. My research has been supported by fellowships at the Huntington Library and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and by positions at Columbia University and University of Southern California.
Recent Publications
“That Sottish and Selfish principle”: Cugoano on Self-Interest, Imagination, and Moral Wrongdoing. Journal of Modern Philosophy, 1; 6(2), (2025), doi: 10.25894/jmp.2698
"Hugo Grotius, the African Slave Trade, and the Natural Law Tradition", Grotiana 45, 2 (2024): 227-253, doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/18760759-20240014
“Ottobah Cugoano on Chattel Slavery and the Moral Limitations of Ius Gentium,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, (2024), 1–23. doi:10.1080/09608788.2024.2307338.
