Biographical Summary

Laurelin Middelkoop is a Ph.D. Candidate at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. She will soon defend her thesis on early modern theories of (con)federal unions of states, with a focus on the writings of French philosopher the Abbé de Saint-Pierre (1658–1743). Alongside her doctoral research, she is currently co-editing two collections about the work of the late historian J. G. A. Pocock (1924–2023), to which she is also a contributor. She obtained her BA in History at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, after which she completed an MA in the History of Political Thought and Intellectual History, jointly administered by University College London and Queen Mary University of London.

While in Washington she will work on her postdoctoral project, ‘Unions before the Union’ on the American reception of perpetual peace texts, examining the extent to which these may have contributed to ideas about unions of states in the British colonies in North America.