Lucia Rubinelli
Bio
Lucia Rubinelli is Assistant Professor in Political Science. Before joining Yale, she held positions as Junior JResearch Fellow in the History of Political Thought at the University of Cambridge, Robinson College and as Fellow in Political Theory at the London School of Economics.
Her primary research interests include the history of nineteenth and twentieth century political thought, political theory, and constitutional theory. Her work explores the variety of ways in which the principle of popular power has been articulated during the French Revolution and after. ‘Her first book, Constituent power. A History, published by Cambridge University Press in 2020, offers a history of the language of constituent power in relation to ideas of national and popular sovereignty. It mainly focuses on how Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès’ first theorisation of pouvoir constituant has been used and misused by subsequent theorists, among whom Carl Schmitt, legal scholars in the post-war period, and Hannah Arendt. In her next research project, Lucia will explore how nineteenth century debates about the referendum travelled into the twentieth century in Europe.
Lucia regularly comments on Italian politics on Talking Politics Podcast and has recently been interviewed by the New Books Network podcast and the Intellectual History Archive about her book. She has written for The New York Times and a piece came out for Prospect Magazine.
Contact
115 Prospect Street, Rosenkranz Hall, Room 305
New Haven, CT 06511
lucia.rubinelli@yale.edu
Education
- PhD, Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge, 2017
- M2 Recherche, Etudes Politiques, EHESS, Paris, 2013
- MSc Socio-Legal Studies, LSE, London, 2012.
- BA International Studies, Università di Trieste, 2011.
Publications
Articles
- “How to think beyond sovereignty: Emmanuel Sieyes on constituent power”, European Journal of Political Theory, April 2016, 1-21.
- “Taming sovereignty: constituent power in nineteenth century French political thought”, History of European Ideas, Vol. 44, Issue 1, 2018, 60-74.
- “Sieyes versus bicameralism”, The Review of Politics, Vol. 8, Issue 2, 2019, 255-279. Citation/Abstract.
- “Elites, democracy and parties in the Italian Constituent debates, 1946-1947”, part of the special section on Parties, Elites and Democracy, Constellations, June 2020.
- “Costantino Mortati and the idea of material constitution”, History of Political Thought, Vol. 40, Issue 3, 2019, 515-546.
- “The Italian state, its regions and the virus”, The Political Quarterly, 91(3), 2020, 553-560.
- “Democracy and sovereignty”, afterword to Neil Walker, “The sovereignty surplus”, International Journal of Constitutional Law, forthcoming January 2021.
- “Constituent power and its institutions”, Critical Exchange, Contemporary Political Theory, April 2021.
Book Chapters
- “The material constitution according to Costantino Mortati” in Goldoni, M. and Wilkinson, M., The Cambridge Handbook on the Material Constitution, CUP, forthcoming.
- “Democracy, parliamentarism and the referendum, 1890-1940”, book chapter in Meckstroth, C. and Moyn, S., The Cambridge History of Democracy, CUP, forthcoming.
- “Of post-men and democracy” book chapter in Xavier Márquez (ed.), Democratic Moments: Reading Democratic Texts, Bloomsbury Academic, 2018, 97-105
- “Sieyes e l’idea del potere costituente della nazione”, book chapter in Alessandro Campi, Francesco Tuccari, Stefano de Luca (eds.), Nazioni e Nazionalismi: Teorie, interpretazioni, sfide attuali, Historica, 2018, 97-105.