Founded in Fall 2015, the Colloquium is an initiative of the Faculty of Law, the Department of Philosophy, and the Department of Political Studies. It consists of a series of seminars and workshops within the broad ambit of the Colloquium’s mandate. Students registered with the course meet with the Colloquium convenors to discuss a recent paper by a leading scholar. The following week, the students meet with the author, along with other faculty members and invited guests, for a workshop on the paper.
The Colloquium’s aim is to promote closer collaboration between legal, philosophical, and political studies, by bringing together students and faculty from these overlapping disciplines to engage in rigorous intellectual engagement. The Colloquium contributes to the Queen’s Collaborative Program in Political and Legal Thought.
In Fall 2021, the Colloquium convenors are Professor Jean Thomas and Professor Grégoire Webber. The Colloquium is funded by Professor Webber's Canada Research Chair in Public Law and Philosophy of Law.
Subject to changes in University public health measure, the Colloquium will be hosted in person for all class meetings and by way of a combination of in-person and remote workshops with our speakers. In advance of each workshop with our speakers, an email will be circulated in the Faculty of Law, Department of Philosophy, and Department of Political Studies.
All members of the Queen's community are welcome to attend the workshops and are invited to communicate with the convenors in order to receive information on how to do so.
Alison McQueen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. Her research focuses on early modern political theory and the history of International Relations thought.
McQueen’s book, Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times (Cambridge University Press, 2018), traces the responses of three canonical political realists—Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and Hans Morgenthau—to hopes and fears about the end of the world. A second book project, Absolving God: Hobbes’s Scriptural Politics, tracks and explains changes in Thomas Hobbes’s strategies of Scriptural argument over time.
Her other ongoing research projects explore methods of textual interpretation, the ethics and politics of catastrophe, and treason in the history of political thought.