Staff Profiles

Andrew Schaap Phone: 8344 3445 Email: aschaap@unimelb.edu.au Office: Medley Building Room 521A

Background

Andrew Schaap joined the department in January 2005 as an Australian Postdoctoral Research Fellow (ARC). A graduate of Political Science at Melbourne, he completed a PhD in political theory at Edinburgh University in 2003. Before moving to Political Science, he was a Research Fellow in the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at The University of Melbourne, with which he remains affiliated.

Research

I am interested in contemporary political theory, particularly as it relates to current debates about transitional justice, human rights and democracy. In doctoral research, I drew on the work of Hannah Arendt to develop a theoretical account of reconciliation as a political ideal. My current research, which is funded by an ARC Discovery grant, aims to understand the politics of human rights. More specifically, I want to develop an account of human rights within the context of a radical theory of democracy.

Subjects Taught

• 166-550 Human rights, State Violence and Polity

Supervision

• political theory (Hannah Arendt, Charles Taylor, Carl Schmitt, Michel Foucault and the later Rawls)
• democratic theory
• human rights and human rights violations
• transitional justice, political reconciliation, forgiveness, collective responsibility, memory and politics

Select Publications

Political Reconciliation. London: Routledge, 2005.
 - Review by Ernesto Verdeja in borderlands e-journal 4(3) 2005.

‘The proto-politics of reconciliation: Lefort and the aporia of forgiveness in Arendt and Derrida’, Australian Journal of Political Science, forthcoming September 2006.

‘Agonism in Divided Societies’, Philosophy and Social Criticism 32(2) 2006: 255-277.

‘Guilty Subjects and Political Responsibility: Jaspers, Arendt and the resonance of the “German question” in politics of reconciliation,’ Political Studies 49(4) 2001: 749-766. 

Full-text publications and working papers

Access all of Andrew's publications and working papers in the University of Melbourne e-Prints Repository.