Dr. Anna Blijdenstein has a background in political science and philosophy. She currently teaches at the PPLE College. In 2021 she received her philosophy doctorate cum laude with the dissertation Liberalism's dangerous religions: Enlightenment legacies in political theory. Her research examines religion’s genealogy in liberal thought and explores the way in which this genealogy can inform contemporary political philosophers working on normative questions about religion’s place within the liberal state.

PhD Project: Liberalism’s Dangerous Religions. Enlightenment legacies in Political Theory

Her project provided a conceptual-historical analysis of the dynamic between religious critique and the framing of Jews and Muslims in Enlightenment thought. It then examined the contributions of contemporary liberal philosophers debating religious freedom in light of that conceptual history. The first part of the project discussed the ways in which the ‘remaking of religion’ in European Enlightenment thought was connected to representations of Judaism and Islam. The second half of project asksed which of these representations and conceptualizations of religion, Jews and Muslims, can be traced in contemporary political theory. It showed that the history of liberal political theory and its treatment of non-Christian religions, especially Judaism and Islam has left us with problematic legacies concerning religion – legacies that are even traceable in those contemporary versions of liberalism that deal with religion in a relatively nuanced way.

For an interview on the research project  see here.