The Britain and Ireland Association for Political Thought (APT) has announced the winners of its mid-career and early-career prizes.

The prizes aim to honor scholars employed in Britain and Ireland “who have made the greatest overall contribution to research and teaching in political thought at their respective career stages.”

The mid-career prize was awarded to Matt Sleat, reader in political theory at the University of Sheffield. The APT writes:

Dr Sleat is best known for his defence of liberal realism, a body of work that revitalised and defined that research agenda. Dr Sleat has made an enormously valuable contribution to political theory through his research, teaching, and broader professional activities, which have included editing the European Journal of Political Theory and the Political Studies Association’s flagship journal, Political Studies.

Matt Sleat, Teresa Bejan, and Paul Sagar

Early-career prizes were awarded to two scholars: Teresa Bejan, Associate Professor of Political Theory at the University of Oxford, and Paul Sagar, Lecturer in Political Theory at King’s College, London.

The APT says:

Dr Teresa Bejan is a lively and energising presence in the discipline and a fantastic advertisement for the serious study of political ideas. In her first book, Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration (Harvard University Press, 2017), she explored theoretical notions of civility and toleration through historical analysis. She regularly speaks to a wider public, whether through her TED Talk, viewed over 1.5 million times, on whether civility is a sham, or her op-ed in the New York Times on ‘What Quakers can teach us about the politics of pronouns’.

Dr Paul Sagar is an inexhaustibly energetic and tremendously impressive scholar and teacher. His work focuses on the history of political thought, but Dr Sagar also works in contemporary political theory, arguing that the eighteenth century’s questions are still very much our questions and that the best political thinking still has much to learn from the past masters of the Scottish Enlightenment. Earlier this year, he appeared on the BBC’s quiz show Mastermind, his special subject being ‘the life and works of Adam Smith’.  Dr Sagar’s first book, The Opinion of Mankind: Sociability and the Theory of the State from Hobbes to Smith, was published by Princeton University Press in 2018, and he has recently completed the manuscript of his second, Adam Smith Reconsidered: History, Commerce, and the Foundations of Modern Politics.

You can read more about these prizes and other APT news here.