Thomas D'Andrea

Prof Thomas D'Andrea, Director/Founder

Thomas D’Andrea was for years a Fellow in Philosophy and the Human Sciences at Wolfson College, Cambridge. He has also held visiting positions at the University of Chicago, the University of St Andrews, and Princeton University. He is the author of the monograph Tradition, Rationality, and Virtue: The Thought of Alasdair MacIntyre (Routledge) and numerous articles in the fields of political philosophy, ethics, metaphysics and the philosophy of religion. He is the Principal Investigator in CSPPR’s current five-year research project ‘Against modernity without restraint: reforming modern social imaginaries’.



Harald Wydra

Prof Harald Wydra, Senior Research Associate

Harald Wydra is Holden Fellow and College Professor in Politics and Director of Studies for Human, Social, and Political Sciences at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. After studying history and political science at the Universities of Regensburg and Salamanca, he took a PhD in Social and Political Sciences from the European University Institute in Florence. He has held visiting fellowships at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and the Australian National University in Canberra and was a Visiting Professor at the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense. His research interests include Eastern European and Russian politics, democracy (comparative and theory), political anthropology, religion and politics, politics of memory, and interpretive methods in the social sciences. His major publications include Continuities in Poland’s Permanent Transition (Palgrave 2001), Communism and the Emergence of Democracy (Cambridge 2007), Politics and the Sacred (Cambridge 2015), and the Handbook of Political Anthropology (Elgar 2020).



Nicholas McBride

Nicholas McBride, Senior Research Associate

Nicholas McBride is a Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge. He was formerly a Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, having studied Law at Brasenose College, Oxford both as an undergraduate and for the Oxford BCL exam. He is the author of numerous books and articles on law, focusing in particular on the philosophical foundations of private law. A selection of his articles is available on SSRN here. He has written a best-selling introduction to studying law called Letters to a Law Student (5th ed, Pearson Education, 2021). He has also written (with Roderick Bagshaw) a textbook on Tort Law (6th edition, Pearson Education, 2018); (with Sandy Steel) an introductory book on studying jurisprudence called Great Debates in Jurisprudence (2nd edition, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); an introductory book on contract law called Key Ideas in Contract Law (Hart Publishing, 2017) (part of a series of books on Key Ideas in law that he edits); and two books on the values underlying English private law, the nature of human flourishing, and the future of the West: The Humanity of Private Law, Part I: Explanation (Hart Publishing, 2019), and The Humanity of Private Law, Part II: Evaluation (Hart Publishing, 2020). In August 2020 he was appointed by the Lord Chancellor, Robert Buckland QC MP, to serve on an independent panel chaired by Lord Faulks that was asked to conduct an Independent Review of Administrative Law. He helped to co-author the panel's report, which was delivered to the government in March 2021, and underlay the Judicial Review and Courts Bill that the government subsequently sought to pass through Parliament.



Mark Retter

Dr Mark Retter, Research Associate

Mark Retter is a Visiting Fellow at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law and a former Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge through which he earned a PhD in law. His teaching and research interests lie in public international law, constitutional law and human rights, and in moral, legal, and political philosophy. He is currently working on a monograph entitled Human Rights After Virtue (for CUP). The book will examine the relevance of Alasdair MacIntyre’s human rights scepticism for contemporary moral and legal theory, while taking inspiration from MacIntyre and Jacques Maritain to give an account of the philosophical foundations for moral and legal human rights as grounded in natural law.

Dr Retter is co-editor of International Law and Peace Settlements (CUP, 2021, with Marc Weller and Andrea Varga), and the Cambridge Handbook of Natural Law and Human Rights (CUP, forthcoming 2022, with Tom Angier and Iain Benson). From 2016 to 2018 he was a Research Associate on the Legal Tools for Peace-Making Project at the Lauterpacht Centre where he helped to develop the award-winning Language of Peace research tool.



Paul Rogers

Dr Paul Rogers, Research Associate

Paul Rogers is a postdoctoral researcher in theology at Emmanuel College, Cambridge where he completed a PhD in the Faculty of Divinity. He received a BA in Classics from Williams College, Massachusetts. He is the author of Aquinas on Prophecy (forthcoming, Catholic U. of America Press, 2023), a study concerned with the place of prophecy in the Christian Middle Ages. His articles have appeared in the The Thomist and New Blackfriars and in the publications of the Dutch research group based at the Thomas Instituut te Utrecht. His research interests include: the role of theology in political thought (especially in the work of René Girard and mimetic theory); theories of secularization in contemporary culture; and, theories of inspiration and their role in theology and politics (e.g. how charismatic authority is conceived in political society).