Thomas Ashby

Thomas Ashby is an intellectual historian based at the University of Tokyo, where he is currently affiliated as a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Postdoctoral Fellow following his nomination by the British Academy. He primarily works on early modern English republicanism and its afterlives in global context. Connected to this, he also researches England and Japan in the Sengoku and Edo periods. Turning to the twentieth century and our own time, he also has an interest in political theory and writes on historiography, particularly varieties of contextualist intellectual history. He currently serves as an editor at Global Intellectual History. He defended his PhD in 2024 at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. Prior to this he completed degrees at the universities of London and Oxford.