Professor Avi LifschitzBack to People

I joined Magdalen in 2017 after a decade of teaching European History at UCL (University College London). Earlier I earned an MA in European History summa cum laude from Tel Aviv University and completed a DPhil here at Oxford (as a student at the History Faculty and Lincoln College). Before moving to London I was also a Junior Research Fellow at Brasenose College. Other research fellowships included the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the Clark Library at UCLA, the Lichtenberg-Kolleg at the University of Göttingen, and the Enlightenment Research Centre (IZEA) at the University of Halle-Wittenberg.
To Magdalen undergraduates I offer papers on early modern European and British History, as well as further undergraduate modules in historiography and intellectual history. At the History Faculty I teach on the MSt in British and European History and offer research supervision. I am also one of the convenors of the Enlightenment Workshop, Oxford’s interdisciplinary research seminar on eighteenth-century European culture.
The intellectual and cultural history of Europe in the long eighteenth century (c. 1680-1815) is my main area of research; I am particularly interested in the links between Enlightenment anthropology, theology, and political theory. Other significant aspects of my work include translation and cross-cultural transfer as well as the history of royal academies and exiled intellectuals in the eighteenth century. I am currently preparing the first modern English edition of a wide range of philosophical works by Frederick II (‘the Great’) of Prussia, while also working on the ’science of man’ in the German Enlightenment.