Dr Iain Stewart

Iain Stewart joined UCL as a modern European historian in 2015, having previously taught at Queen Mary, University of London and the Institut d’études politiques de Paris (Sciences Po). He works on the intellectual history of liberalism and its critics in the twentieth century and has published two books on this subject. The first is an edited collection on the ‘liberal moment’ in late twentieth-century French thought; the second a monograph called Raymond Aron and Liberal Thought in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2020). His current projects focus on the history of cold war liberalism, the French intellectual presence in London during World War II, and the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s place in twentieth-century French intellectual history.

Major publications

• ‘The French Press in Wartime London, 1940-1944: From the Politics of Exile to Inter-Allied Relations,’ Journal of Contemporary History 58:1 (2023)
• Raymond Aron and Liberal Thought in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2020)
• ‘Recent Developments in the New Historiography of (Neo)Liberalism’, Contemporary European History, 29:1 (February 2020)
• Iain Stewart and Stephen W Sawyer (eds), In Search of the Liberal Moment: Democracy, Anti-totalitarianism and Intellectual Politics in France since 1950 (New York: Palgrave, 2016)
• ‘France’s anti-68 liberal revival’ in Emile Chabal (ed.), France since the 1970s: History, Politics and Memory in an Age of Uncertainty (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 199-223.
• ‘The origins of the “end of ideology”: Raymond Aron and Industrial Civilisation’ in José Colen and Elisabeth Dutartre-Michaut (eds.), A Companion to Raymond Aron (New York: Palgrave, 2015), 177-190.
• ‘Sartre, Aron, and the contested legacy of the anti-positivist turn in French thought, 1938-1960’, Sartre Studies International 17 (Summer 2011), 41-60.

For a full list of publications, see Iain’s Iris profile.

Teaching

• The Cultural Cold War in Europe, 1917-1989 (second- and third-year thematic module)
• The Occupation in French History, Culture and Memory (second year research seminar))
• New Histories of Liberalism (advanced seminar)
• Theories of Totalitarianism (elective course for MA students)

Contact information

Email: i.stewart@ucl.ac.uk

Telephone: 020 7679 3607

Office: 211, 26 Gordon Square

Student support & feedback hours: Tuesdays (term time, excluding reading weeks) 11:00-12:00 (via Teams) and Thursdays (term time, excluding reading weeks 16:00-17:00 (in office).
Students should book appointments via the Moodle scheduler; for all other appointments, including for students who cannot make my scheduled support hours, please email to arrange a meeting. 

Student support & feedback hours are an opportunity for students to chat with their module tutors about their ideas, any support they might need with the module, and to go through feedback from their assessments. 

Departmental/faculty roles

• Teaching Fellows Lead Mentor

Qualifications

PhD University of Manchester, 2011