Professor Richard Whatmore

Historian

Richard Whatmore is an intellectual historian and historian of political thought. He is co-director of the St Andrews Institute of Intellectual History.

Whatmore was educated at Framwellgate Moore Comprehensive School andFitzwilliam College, Cambridge. His father, Josiah Whatmore, was a miner in the North Staffordshire coalfield from the age of thirteen. Whatmore spent a year as Choate Fellow at Harvard and returned to Cambridge for PhD research under the supervision of the Hungarian defector Istvan Hont. Whatmore taught intellectual history at the University of Sussex from 1993, becoming Professor of Intellectual History and the History of Political Thought.

In 2013, he moved with his wife Ruth Woodfield to St Andrews, where he is currently Professor of Modern History. Ruth Woofield is Professor of Equalities and Organisation. 

Whatmore is the author of Republicanism and the French Revolution (Oxford, 2000), Against War and Empire (Yale, 2012), What is Intellectual History? (Polity, 2015), Terrorists, Anarchists and Republicans (Princeton, 2019), and The History of Political Thought: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2021). His most recent book is The End of Enlightenment (Allen Lane, 2023).