Elena Yi-Jia Zeng is a Research Associate and the Assistant Director of the Centre for the Study of Governance and Society, specialising in eighteenth-century British and European politics and culture. More broadly, her research addresses the cultural, epistemological and institutional factors that give rise to liberalism. In pursuing this line of inquiry, she investigates the role of scepticism in modern moral and political thought, and how it has further raised the question of freedom of inquiry in the face of religious, moral and political authority since the eighteenth century. Apart from canonical thinkers, she is interested in how leading cultural figures, such as Brahms, embodied liberal ideas to reconstruct the experiences and meanings of living in an age of liberalism.

Elena’s works have been published in peer-reviewed history, politics and philosophy journals. She is working on her first monograph The Politics of Belief in Enlightenment Scepticism. Her new project on the debates over economic and civilisational stagnation investigates the economic, social, cultural and political factors that cause a ‘stationary state’, and how it constituted British and French liberals’ primary concern over the progress and decline of their nations and the future of European civilisation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Elena was elected an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2025. She spent a year at Princeton University Centre for Human Values as a Postdoctoral Research Associate. She obtained her PhD and won the Prince Consort Prize & Seeley Medal for the Best Dissertation of the Year from the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge in 2024.

For more information, please visit Elena’s personal website.

Research interests

• Modern British, Scottish and Irish history
• Modern European history
• Political theory
• Enlightenment Intellectual history
• Political economy

Latest publications

Journal articles

‘The Role of Philosophy in Hume’s Critique of Empire’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 31:2 (2023), 136–57.

‘Empire and Liberty in Adam Ferguson’s Republicanism’, History of European Ideas, 48:7 (2022), 909–29.

‘The Role of Consent in Locke’s Theory of State’, Historical Inquiry: Journal of National Taiwan University, 66 (2020), 201–36.

Edited collection

Special issue ‘David Hume’s Political Epistemology’, Cosmos and Taxis, 12:1–2 (2024).

Review essays

'Review: Ales Biezina and Michael Beckerman, eds, Martini and His World, Global Intellectual History (2026), OnlineFirst.

‘Review: Richard Whatmore, The End of Enlightenment’, Society, 61 (2024), 732–5.

‘Review: Paul Russell, Recasting Hume and Early Modern Philosophy’, Journal of Scottish Philosophy, 22:3 (2024), 254–9.

‘The Multifaced Hume’, New History, 32:2 (2021), 331–42.

‘The Political Ideal of the Enlightenment in the American Revolution’, Intellectual History, 9 (2019), 491–506.

‘The Historical Depth of Ancient and Modern Political Thought’, New History, 30:1 (2019), 167–78.

‘A History of Scottish Philosophy’, National Taiwan University Philosophical Review, 56 (2018), 177–202.

Other writings

‘Bartók and Janáček at the End of Liberal Society’, VAN: An International Classical Music Magazine, 29^th January 2026.

‘Hume and Rousseau on Liberty’, Liberty Matters series, Liberty Fund Online Library, 2024.

‘Scepticism from the Pyrrhonian Crisis to Hume’, Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, 2021.