Alison McQueen in Scotland

Alison McQueen joined the Stanford faculty in 2011 and is associate professor in the department of political science, with a courtesy appointment in the department of history. Her research focuses on the history of political thought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with particular attention to the intersections of religion and politics. She is the author of Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times (Cambridge University Press, 2018), which examines how Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and Hans Morgenthau responded to hopes and fears about the end of the world. She has published numerous scholarly articles on Machiavelli, “mirrors for princes” and other advice books for rulers, Hobbes and religion, as well as the ethics and politics of catastrophe. She is currently completing a book on Hobbes and religion and beginning a new project on treason and betrayal in the history of political thought. A former mural painter, Professor McQueen is also deeply interested in the connections between politics and visual culture.

Throughout our journey, Professor McQueen will bring Scotland’s complex political history to life through lectures exploring fundamental questions of power, legitimacy, and resistance. From the education of a future king who believed in divine right by a tutor who championed popular sovereignty, to the clash of loyalties at Culloden and the state’s systematic transformation of the Highlands that followed, these lectures trace Scotland’s turbulent path. We’ll also explore the Scottish Enlightenment’s revolutionary ideas about commerce and society and examine the fine line between reform and sedition through the lens of the infamous trials conducted by Professor McQueen’s ancestor, Lord Braxfield.

At Stanford

• Nehal Raj and Jenny Raj Civics Faculty Fellow in Undergraduate Teaching (2024–25)

• Faculty Director, Undergraduate Program in Ethics in Society (2020–24)

• Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Political Science (2019-2022)

• Dean’s Award for Achievement in the First Years of Teaching (2013)

Other Roles, Positions, and Awards

• Associate Editor, American Political Science Review (2024–present)

• International Advisory Board Member, At the End of the World, Research Program at Lund University, Sweden (2023-present)

• Co-Editor, Political Theory (2022–23)

• Winner, APSA Leo Strauss Award for the best doctoral dissertation in political philosophy