Dr Andrew Schaap

Originally from Melbourne, Australia, Andrew has been a lecturer at the University of Exeter since 2007 and has been based at the Cornwall campus since 2019. His teaching and research interests are in democratic theory and twentieth century political thought, including European thinkers, such as Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière but also more overlooked thinkers such as Anna Julia Cooper and Claudia Jones. 

Andrew's research has included examining the politics of reconciliation, especially in the settler-colonial context of Australia. He has also worked on the politics of citizenship in Australia (in relation to indigenous struggles for land rights) and in the UK (in relation to nationality legislation and anti-immigration politics). His current research is focused on the politics of civility with a particular interest in how intersectional feminist theory can contribute to understanding the ‘labour of civility.’

Andrew is the author of Political Reconciliation (Routledge 2005) and has co-edited books on The Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Australia, Hannah Arendt and Law and Agonistic Politics. He has been published articles in Perspectives on Politics, International Journal of Human Rights, Political Theory, Political Studies, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, European Journal of Political Theory, Australian Humanities Review, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Constellations, Australian Journal of Political Science and Social and Legal Studies among other journals. 

Prior to joining the University Exeter in 2007, Andrew held research posts in the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics and as an Australian Research Council (ARC) postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at The University of Melbourne. In 2011, he was a Visiting Fellow in the Australian Centre for Indigenous History at the Australian National University. In 2023, Andrew was a visiting researcher in the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen.