Teresa Bejan

Date
-
Location
Encina Hall West, Room 400 (GSL)
Speaker

Teresa Bejan, Associate Professor of Political Theory, University of Oxford

 

 

Biography

Dr Bejan’s research brings perspectives from early modern English and American political thought to bear on questions in contemporary political theory and practice and on many of the pressing questions facing liberal democracies today - such as what the proper scope of religious liberty should be and how to handle partisanship and hate speech.

Her book, Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration, examines contemporary calls for civility in light of seventeenth-century debates about religious toleration. Many of the pressing questions facing liberal democracies today closely recall early modern concerns about the limits of toleration and the dangers posed by sectarianism, evangelical expression, and so-called 'persecution of the tongue'. Then as a now, thinkers appealed to civility as a way to reconcile the tension between diversity and disagreement, but determining what civility requires can be complicated. While some restraint on expression is surely necessary to make disagreement tolerable, accusations of 'incivility' can easily become pretexts for persecution.