PhD Candidate, International Relations, Classics, and History
Thesis title: The English Politeia: a Study of Seventeenth-Century Constitutional Literature
School of IR profile
BIO
Mary is a PhD candidate in the Schools of International Relations, Classics, and History at the University of St Andrews. As an interdisciplinary researcher, her work examines how literary works inform political experience and analysis, approaching this through historical case studies. Her doctoral thesis discusses the “writing of a nation” during the English Revolution, using the Ancient Greek politeia as an analytical lens. The project aims to theorise the function of written constitutionalism beyond legal codification, particularly by re-evaluating the exercise of constituent power within the Unwritten Constitution.
Beyond her doctoral research, Mary is the Managing Editor of The British Journal of Politics and International Relations. In Autumn of 2020, she will also be a Scottish Graduate School of Social Science intern at the Scottish Government’s Constitution and Inter-Governmental Relations division. She is a member of the Ancient Philosophy Network at St Andrews, a former Treasurer of BISA’s CRIPT working group, convened the St Andrews Graduate Conference on International Political Theory two years in a row (2018, 2019), and has tutored at both Honours and Sub-Honours Undergraduate programmes in the Schools of International Relations and Classics at St Andrews. She holds Master’s degrees (with Distinctions awarded for their dissertations) from the Universities of Edinburgh and St Andrews, and a BA from Aberystwyth University, where she lectured in its Summer University programme.