Shiru Lim is assistant professor at the Institute for History.

More information about Shiru Lim

Research

The central problem around which my research revolves is the nature of the relationship between intellectual and political authority. I’m therefore interested in how people in the past have conceived of the relationship between the realms of the intellectual and the political, between knowledge and power, and between intellectuals and the state. Most of my work focuses on the period c.1680-1820 and on the French-, German-, and Russian-speaking world; I am committed to multilingual and cross-boundary approaches to the study of history.

The aforementioned subjects form the thematic spine of my first monograph, Philosophy & Government in Enlightenment Europe: Frederick II, Catherine II, and the philosophes, under contract with Cambridge University Press. This is a book about philosophers, rulers, their relationships in eighteenth-century Europe, and their attempts to define the terms of those relationships. Examining a range of all protagonists’ writings, especially their correspondence, the book asks what the conjunction of these authors and rulers reflects about the relationship between intellectuals and the state; about conquest and subjection; about enlightenment and occlusion; about the nature of counsel, political change, and political legitimacy. It thus recasts a group of well-known figures in a new account exploring how intellectuals try (not necessarily successfully) to hold rulers to account, and play gatekeepers to the realms of the literary and intellectual into which those who wielded political power attempted to intervene.

A second book, in its early stages, expands on my overarching interests. Its subject is Russian imperial expansion and the European Enlightenment; it seeks to examine the place of knowledge production and its narrativization in Russian imperial expansion as well as in European attempts to conceive of and react to it. The sites of conquest and contestation around which the work is structured include Nerchinsk, Taganrog, Orenburg, and Odessa. At the same time, years of physical peripeteia have engendered their intellectual equivalent; I have thus inadvertently developed a wide range of interests and several research projects of varying scope, on, for instance, the conjunction of artifice, civility, and power in early modern political thinking. Together with Devin Vartija (Utrecht) and Jessica Patterson (Cambridge) I am also co-editing the Bloomsbury Handbook of the Enlightenment.

Curriculum vitae

Before taking up this assistant professorship at Leiden in August 2023, I was Junior Fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (2021-23), Early Career Fellow at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg at the University of Göttingen (2019-21), and Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence (2018-19). I took my BA and PhD in History from University College London (UCL)—the former at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), where I also studied Russian—and my MPhil in Modern European History from the University of Cambridge.

Publications