Biography

Shiru Lim completed her doctoral thesis on ‘Philosophical Kingship in Eighteenth-Century Europe: Frederick II, Catherine II, and the philosophes’ at the Department of History of University College London (UCL). This work explores what Frederick II and Catherine II’s relationships with the philosophes reveal about what exactly made eighteenth-century conceptions of philosophical kingship ‘philosophical’. Her thesis uncovers a hitherto under-explored, parrhêsiastic conception of philosophy, and shows that disagreements in eighteenth-century Europe about how to do philosophy were equally conflicts about how to do politics.
Shiru’s research interests are in the intellectual history and the history of political thought of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. As a Max Weber Fellow at the EUI, she will begin a new project, ‘The Politics of Deception in Enlightenment Europe’, exploring the ways in which deception and its various iterations—simulation, dissimulation, equivocation, lying, etc.—were conceived as mental and political processes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. She also plans to start developing her doctoral thesis into a book manuscript, and to work on a short project on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French Tacitism.
Shiru holds a BA in History from UCL (2013), and an MPhil in Modern European History from the University of Cambridge (2014). She maintains broader philosophical interests in the philosophy of language, as well as in theories of meaning and historical explanation.
Shiru has extensive experience teaching both history and politics undergraduates the history of political thought from antiquity to the nineteenth century, and the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe.