Dr Robin Bunce
BA MPHIL PHD
Fellow in Politics and Postgraduate Tutor
Robin Bunce is a Fellow working on British politics and the history of ideas. He has published on Black Power as an ideology and a movement in the United Kingdom, the work of Thomas Hobbes and Francis Bacon, and science fiction and utopianism. He has written on politics and contemporary culture for the Huffington Post, the New Statesman, the Independent and the Guardian. He recently published a biography of Diane Abbott MP with Samara Linton. Together with historian Paul Field, he was also a historical consultant on the Steve McQueen film Mangrove, and Rogan Production’s recent documentary on Black Power.
History of Philosophy, Political History, Political Thought
History of Philosophy, Political History, Political Thought
Books:
Thomas Hobbes: Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers, (Continuum, 2009).
Darcus Howe: a Political Biography, (Bloomsbury, 2014) Co-Authored with Paul Field.
Blade Runner 2049 and Philosophy, (Open Court, 2019) co-edited with Trip McCrossin
Diane Abbott: the Authorised Biography (Bite Back, 2020) co-authored with Samara Linton
Articles in Volumes:
‘John Locke (1632-1704)’, in Duncan Brack (ed.), Dictionary of Liberal Thought (Politico, 2007).
‘Consent and social contract’ and ‘Moral obligation’ in Sami-Juhani Savonius, Paul Schuurman and Jonathan Walmsley, (eds.), Locke and His Times (Continuum, 2010).
'The Evil of the Daleks’ in Court Lewis and Paul Smithka (eds.) Doctor Who and Philosophy (Open Court, 2011).
”A good man goes to war?” The Twelfth Doctor and the politics of conflict.’ in Andrew O’Day ed. Doctor Who - The Twelfth Night: A Critical Celebration of the Peter Capaldi and Steven Moffat Era (I.B. Tauris, forthcoming 2017)
'"Race Today cannot fail," Darcus Howe and the Race Today Collective in the long 1980s’ in Jonathan Davis and Rohan McWilliam eds., Labour in the 1980s, (Manchester, 2017)
'Doppelgängers, doubles and tulpas: Twin Peaks and the lost of self’, in Richard Greene & Rachel Robison-Greene eds., Twin Peaks and Philosophy, (Open Court, forthcoming 2018)
‘Race and the left: from protest to power? The story of Black Sections, 1983-87’, in Nathan Yeowell ed., Rethinking Labour’s Past, (IB Tauri, 2022) with Samara Linton
‘Televising the future: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954), Nigel Kneale, and dystopian horror’, in Derek Johnston, Nigel Kneale and Horror, (Manchester University Press, Forthcoming 2024)
Refereed Journal Articles:
'Thomas Hobbes’ relationship with Frances Bacon - an introduction’, Hobbes Studies XVI 2003.
'Hobbes’ forgotten natural histories’, Hobbes Studies XIX 2006.
'Obi B. Egbuna, CLR James and the Birth of Black Power in Britain: Black Radicalism in Britain 1967-1972’, Twentieth Century British History XXII, 3 2011, co-authored with Paul Field.
Journalism
'Frank Critchlow: Community leader who made the Mangrove Restaurant the beating heart of Notting Hill’, The Independent, 23 September 2010
'Mangrove Nine: the court challenge against police racism in Notting Hill’, The Guardian, 29 November 2010
'Darcus Howe and the extraordinary campaign to expose racism in the police’, The New Statesman, 7 January 2014
'The Black Leveller: Writing Darcus Howe: a political biography’, The Historian, March 2014
'Darcus Howe obituary', The Guardian, 3 April 2017
'Michael X and the British War on Black Power', BBC History Magazine, September 2017
'Political parties and their favourite fonts', New Statesman, 2 June 2017
‘Corbyn supporters are not a cult’, politics.co.uk, 3 July 2017
'Blade Runner 2049's politics, New Statesman, 16 October 2017
Nineteen Eighty-Four: to the future or to the past?’, BBC History: History Extra, 25 June 2022. (link to: https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/nineteen-eighty-four-history-dystopian-novel-orwell-legacy-adaptations/)
‘Jubilee 1977: Black Power Jubilee’, London Review of Books, Vol. 44, No. 11, 9 June 2022, with Paul Field. (link to: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n11/robin-bunce-and-paul-field/jubilee-1977)
‘“There’s no enlightenment, just psychosis” Search Party Review’, We are Cult, 27 January 2023. (Link to: https://wearecult.rocks/theres-no-enlightenment-just-psychosis-search-party)
POLIS
