William Selinger is a political theorist and historian of political thought who teaches in the Constitutional Studies program. His research focuses on the modern history of representative democracy. He is the author of Parliamentarism: From Burke to Weber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), which won the Montreal Political Theory Manuscript Award. The book is about the effort to secure parliamentary control over the executive and make parliament a genuinely deliberative assembly in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and France. Selinger argues that these aims were fundamental to the emergence of liberalism, and he shows that the challenging world of parliamentary politics was a crucial context for liberal thinkers such as Benjamin Constant, François Guizot, Alexis de Tocqueville, and John Stuart Mill. His next book, under contract with Princeton University Press, is a comprehensive study of Montesquieu’s life and thought.
Selinger’s writing has also been published in Modern Intellectual History, Review of Politics, European Journal of Political Theory, History of European Ideas, Constellations, Contemporary Political Theory, Tocqueville Review, Philosophy & Social Criticism, Chronicle of Higher Education, and several edited volumes. In 2024, he was selected to the Quentin Skinner Lectureship in Intellectual History since c1500 at the University of Cambridge.
Selinger holds a PhD from Harvard University and a BA from the University of Chicago. Before coming to OU, he taught at University College London.
