Dr Shreyaa Bhatt, BA (QMUL), MA (UCL), PhD (RHUL)

Profile

Shreyaa Bhatt joined the School of Politics and International Relations in September 2023 as Senior Lecturer in Politics.  Previously she worked at Newcastle (Philosophy), Essex (Government), Birkbeck (Politics), UCL (School of Slavonic and East European Studies) and Royal Holloway (Classics and Ancient History).  Prior to this she completed a doctoral dissertation on the writing of imperial sovereignty in Tacitus’ Annales which was funded by a Max Planck Society Dissertation Fellowship.  Her research interests cross Politics, Philosophy and History.

Teaching

POL110 – Thinking Politically: Concepts, Theories and Ideologies

POL263 – Modern Political Thought I

Research

Research Interests:

Shreyaa has research interests in ancient and modern political thought, rhetoric and techniques of persuasion, and Critical Philosophy of Race.  She also has interests related to pedagogy – in particular the meanings and discourses of ‘student engagement’, the production of norms relating to student ability, and Deficit Thinking.

Examples of research funding:

Shreyaa has received funding from Royal Holloway and The Max Planck Society, which supported research work on Historiography and Memory Studies.

Publications

Special Issues:

Alston, R and Bhatt, S. (eds.) Foucault’s Rome. Special Issue of Foucault Studies, no. 22, January (2017), pp. 8-133. 

Peer-Reviewed Articles:

Bhatt, S. “The Augustan Principate and the Emergence of Biopolitics: A Comparative Historical Perspective” in R. Alston and S. Bhatt (eds.) Foucault’s Rome. Special Issue of Foucault Studies, no. 22 (2017), pp. 72-93.

Bhatt, S. “Useful Vices: Tacitus’s Critique of Corruption” in Arethusa, Vol. 50.3, (2017), pp. 311-333.

Bhatt, S. “Rhetoric and Truth: Tacitus, Rancière and Democratic Historiography” in Helios Vol 43.2 (2016), pp. 163-189.

Book Chapters:

Bhatt, S. “Exiled in Rome: The Writing of Other Spaces in Tacitus’s Annales” in W. Fitzgerald and E. Spentzou (eds.), The Production of Space in Latin Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2018), pp. 215-234.

Dictionary Entries:

Bhatt, S. “Percennius” in V. E. Pagan (ed.), The Tacitus Encyclopedia, Malden: Wiley- Blackwell (2023)

Supervision

Shreyaa would be interested in supervising doctoral research on modern and contemporary political thought.  She would be especially pleased to collaborate with doctoral researchers looking at the work of Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben and / or Jacques Rancière.

Public Engagement

Shreyaa has worked with Young Citizens Charity as part of the ‘Democracy in Schools’ project.  This project, developed via a partnership between Young Citizens and the Department of Government at the University of Essex, provided final-year Undergraduate students with the opportunity to teach politics at local schools in Colchester.