Professor Avi Lifschitz

Background

In 2017 I joined Magdalen after teaching European History at UCL (University College London). I have held research fellowships at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study), the Clark Library at UCLA, the Enlightenment Research Centre (IZEA) at the University of Halle-Wittenberg, and CRASSH at the University of Cambridge (among others). Awards have included grants from the Leverhulme Trust and the Thyssen Stiftung, as well as the 2020 James L. Clifford Prize of the American Society for 18th-Century Studies.

Teaching

To Magdalen undergraduates I offer papers on European and British history, as well as historiography and intellectual history. At the History Faculty I teach on the MSt strands in British and European History 1700-1850 and Intellectual History, and offer research supervision. I am a co-convenor of the Enlightenment Workshop, Oxford’s interdisciplinary research seminar on eighteenth-century European culture.

Research

The intellectual and cultural history of Europe in the long eighteenth century (c. 1680-1830) 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 cross-cultural transfer and changing attitudes to paganism and polytheism. Recent publications include a monograph on Frederick the Great as a philosopher (Princeton, 2027) and the first modern English edition of a wide range of writings by the Prussian monarch (Princeton, 2020).

Selected Publications

• The Last Philosopher King: Frederick the Great as Enlightenment Author (Princeton University Press, 2027)
• Essay Competitions in the Long Eighteenth Century: Writing to Win the Prize, ed. with Martin Urmann (Liverpool University Press, 2026)
• Frederick the Great’s Philosophical Writings, ed. Avi Lifschitz, trans. Angela Scholar (Princeton University Press, 2021)
• ‘The Book of Job and the Sex Life of Elephants: The Limits of Evidential Credibility in Eighteenth-Century Natural History and Biblical Criticism’, The Journal of Modern History 91.4 (2019), 739-775
• Rethinking Lessing’s Laocoon: Antiquity, Enlightenment, and the ‘Limits’ of Painting and Poetry, ed. with Michael Squire (Oxford University Press, 2017)
• Engaging with Rousseau: Reaction and Interpretation from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2016; paperback ed., 2019)
• ‘Rousseau’s Imagined Antiquity’, a special issue of the journal History of Political Thought 37 (2016)
• ‘Between Friedrich Meinecke and Ernst Cassirer: Isaiah Berlin’s Bifurcated Enlightenment’, in Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment, eds. Laurence Brockliss and Ritchie Robertson (Oxford University Press, 2016), 51-66.
• Language and Enlightenment: The Berlin Debates of the Eighteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2012; paperback ed., 2016)
• ‘The Arbitrariness of the Linguistic Sign: Variations on an Enlightenment Theme’, Journal of the History of Ideas 73.4 (2012), 537-557
• Epicurus in the Enlightenment, ed. with Neven Leddy (Voltaire Foundation, 2009)