Theodore Christov
Theodore Christov
Associate Professor of Honors, History, and International Affairs
Full-time Faculty
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Professor Christov received his PhD in Political Theory from UCLA in 2008. He holds an MTS from Harvard and a BA from Thomas Aquinas College. From 2008-11 he was Visiting Assistant Professor of political theory at Northwestern University. In 2011 he joined the faculty at George Washington University, where he teaches in the University's Honors Program and the Department of History. He is also Faculty Affiliate at the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at the Elliott School and serves on the faculty advisory committee of the Peace Studies Program.
His research interests lie in the fields of intellectual history, particularly 17th and 18th centuries, and modern political and international thought; the history of international law; and classical theories of international relations. He is the author of Before Anarchy: Hobbes and His Critics in Modern International Thought, Cambridge University Press, 2015 with a paperback edition 2017, which examines European debates over the external relations of states in the works of Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Vattel, and how these early modern debates have been de-historicized in contemporary international relations.
He teaches Honors proseminars on the origins and evolution of modern political and social thought from antiquity to modernity, and History seminars on intellectual history from the 16th century to the present and on the Enlightenment and its critics.
Early modern and modern political theory; Intellectual history; History of international thought; Classical theories of international relations; European integration.
Ph.D., University of California - Los Angeles
HIST 3103 European Intellectual History: Early Modern
HIST 3104 European Intellectual History: Modern
HIST 3001 Special Topics
- Capitalism and Enlightenment
- Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism
- Enlightenment's Enemies
HONR 1015 Honors Proseminar: Origins and Evolution of Modern Thought I
HONR 1016 Honors Proseminar: Origins and Evolution of Modern Thought II
HONR 2053 Honors Proseminar: Arts and Humanities
- (2015). Before Anarchy: Hobbes and His Critics in Modern International Thought (Cambridge University Press)
- (2013). 'Vattel's Rousseau: Jus Gentium and the Natural Liberty of States,' in Quentin Skinner and Martin van Gelderen, eds., Freedom and the Construction of Europe: New Perspectives on Philosophical, Religious, and Political Controversies (Cambridge University Press).
- (2010). Review of Daniel Deudney, "Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village." The European Legacy 15:6.
- (2008). 'The Federal Idea of Europe: Late Eighteenth-Century Debates,' in Dominic Eggel and Brunhilde Wehinger, eds., Imaginig Europe in the Eighteenth Century (Hannover: Wehrhahn Verlag).
- (2007). Review of Paul Keal, "European Conquest and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: The Moral Backwardness of International Society," History of European Ideas 33:3.
- (2007). 'Thomas Hobbes in the History of International Political Thought,' The European Legacy 12:4.