Hi, so my name's Waseem Yaqoob,
I'm a Fellow at Pembroke College
in the Faculty of History.
My research focuses mainly on the history of
ideas about politics in the 20th century,
bit of the 19th century too,
mostly in Europe, but often outside of Europe,
and what I really focus on is the relationship between
politics and social change,
and how various thinkers, intellectuals, journalists, philosophers,
try to understand those changes,
and put them into words.
And also what effect their words had on some of those processes.
So I've just completed a book
on the political thought of a German-Jewish woman
called Hannah Arendt,
one of the most recognised political thinkers of the 20th century.
And one of the things she grappled with
as a stateless person for eighteen years,
an emigre to the United States,
was how we can build a sort of politics
that includes the marginalised and gives them a voice
and a stake in society
without turning into a form of charity.
What she was perhaps most exercised by
was the rise of sort of nativist
ethnocentric, violent movements
that used political terror in the middle of the century,
so Stalinism and Nazism.
So lots of people have been tempted to draw parallels between
the epoch she was writing about, the 20s and 30s,
a period of intense political mobilisation
of racism, of imperialism,
and interstate violence,
and some of the dangers that people associate with the present day.
So my work tries to put her back into that
febrile context in the middle of the century,
see where her ideas came from,
who she was engaging with and why,
and even perhaps, what we can learn
from her and other thinkers grappling with those problems
of inclusion and exclusion,
racism and violence.
So that's the book I've just completed
and I also teach
for Pembroke, for the Faculty, I run a Masters programme
on political thought and intellectual history.
My research I'm glad to say does feed
into my teaching, so I teach the history of political ideas,
from the 17th century
to the present, so lots of famous philosophers,
some less famous philosophers,
writing about a whole range of topics
from the economy to the nature of the state,
to imperialism, to racism, and so on.
One of the really great things about teaching
at Pembroke and at Cambridge in general
is that you get to build very serious, intense
working relationships with students,
you get to guide them through a particular period
in a very intensive teaching format.
So that really is one of the pleasures of being a Fellow here.
What I'm working on currently,
now that I've finished this book on Hannah Arendt,
is something on the international ideas
of German thinkers from the early 20th century
to the late 70s or 80s.
So we're used to thinking of Germany as a behemoth sort of striding or straddling
across European politics,
and we're used to thinking of how it became this power
in a few set ways,
we think of the Nazis and then we think of the European Union,
and we think of those things as quite separate epochs in a way.
And I guess what I'm trying to do is show the continuity
and also some of the changes in how Germans thought about
international politics, world politics, and Europe especially,
across these wars and catastrophes.
So I'm looking forward to bringing some of that
work into my teaching as well.
