Teresa M. Bejan

Teresa M. Bejan is Professor of Political Theory and a Fellow of Oriel College at the University of Oxford.

Before arriving in Oxford in 2015, she taught as an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto and as a Mellon Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University. She received her PhD in Political Science with distinction from Yale University in 2013 and holds previous degrees from the Universities of Chicago and Cambridge.

Professor Bejan’s research brings historical perspectives to bear on questions in contemporary political theory and philosophy. She has published extensively on themes of free speech, civility, tolerance and equality in historical contexts ranging from ancient Athens to 20th-century analytic political philosophy. To date, her work has been recognised by numerous international awards and fellowships, among them the Groupe de recherche en philosophie politique en Montreal (GRIPP)’s Political Theory Manuscript Award, the Britain and Ireland Association for Political Thought’s inaugural Early Career Prize, the Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Constitutional and Political Theory at McGill University, the Balzan Skinner Fellowship in Modern Intellectual History at Cambridge, and the American Political Science Association’s Leo Strauss Award. In 2021, she was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Politics, which celebrates ‘exceptional researchers whose work has already attracted international recognition and whose future careers are exceptionally promising’.

Professor Bejan's first book, Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration (Harvard University Press, 2017), examined contemporary calls for civility in light of 17th-century debates about religious toleration. It defended an ideal of ‘mere civility’ consistent with American free speech fundamentalism derived from Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island. The book was called "penetrating and sophisticated" by The New York Times and has been widely reviewed in scholarly and popular publications. Her second book, First Among Equals: Visions of Equality before Egalitarianism (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2026), explores how and why an ancient commonplace—that all human beings are somehow “equal”—became an effectual premise of political argument in early modern England, and what this might mean for our own efforts to redeem equality as a political ideal, here and now.

Alongside her books and edited collections, Professor Bejan publishes regularly in leading journals like American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, Political Theory, and Modern Intellectual History. She also writes regularly for popular outlets likeThe Atlantic, and is a frequent radio and podcast guest on popular programmes like BBC Radio 4's In Our Time. Her 2018 TED Talk, ‘Is Civility a Sham?,’ has received over 1.7 million views.

Previous Posts

Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto (2014-15)

Fellow, Society of Fellows in the Humanities, and Lecturer in Political Science, Columbia University (2013-14)

Teaching

• Theory of Politics

• Political Thought: Plato to Rousseau

• Modern Political Theory: Machiavelli to Burke

• The Political and Ethical Thought of Plato and Aristotle

• Equality: History & Theory

• Methods in Political Theory

• Political Theory Professionalisation Seminar

Media

• Ted Talk: Is Civility a Sham?

• “All men are created equal” 📜 On the 250th anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence, Professor Teresa Bejan explains the history of the foundational document's most famous line…