Graduate Student, History
D.Phil candidate
Christ Church
Thesis Title: The Newton of the Mind: the Life and Thought of David Hartley
Pietro Corsi
Margaret Pelling
About
I am a postgraduate student in the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford, and specialize in English intellectual history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In my research, I tend to concentrate on interdisciplinary topics that combine explorations of the history of science along with the history of art and the history of literature. In the future, I hope to pursue topics in the history of food.
My current research is focused on the life and thought of David Hartley (1705-57), who was an eighteenth-century English "physician-philosopher" and founder of the Associationist school of psychology. My dissertation concentrates on linking Hartley's theories, found in his two-volume treatise "Observations on Man" (1749), with contemporary Newtonian concepts. It also explores Hartley's relationships with other "Newtonian" figures, including George Cheyne, Nicholas Saunderson, Robert Smith, John Mickleburgh, among many others.
