I joined Royal Holloway in September 2017 from the University of Liverpool. I have been a Humboldt Fellow at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, a EURIAS Fellow at ENS Lyon and a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow. This year I will be spending some time at the Institute of Advance Studies at Princeton. 

I have taken on a series of roles in education leadership and am currently an OfS Quality and Standards Assessor, as well as sitting on the QAA benchmarking group for Philosophy. In this context, I also have experience in designing and implementing institutional strategic projects, particularly as lead of the University's Assessment Futures project, which reduced assessment on over 1,000 modules and rationalised course learning outcomes on all courses university-wide. I'm equally interested in research leadership and have a longstanding working relationship with UKRI, founding the Cultural Engagement Showcase in collaboration with the AHRC in 2014, sitting on three UKRI peer-review colleges and related panels and being commended for my work developing the AHRC-DfG UK-Germany funding programme. I have also been appointed an external expert for funding bodies in Austria, France, Germany, Poland and Slovenia.

I am a historian of philosophy working on French, German and Dutch traditions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This includes:

(a) research on F. W. J. Schelling and philosophers of nature, like Kielmeyer and Eschenmayer (e.g., Schelling's Theory of Symbolic Language, The Schelling Reader and Kielmeyer and the Organic World). This has led to work on the plant humanities and I am currently editing (with Danielle Sands) The Plant Humanities: Theory, Art and the Botanic Gaze.

(b) research on the origins of German Idealism and Romanticism, particularly Hemsterhuis' philosophy (e.g., François Hemsterhuis and the Writing of Philosophy and The Edinburgh Edition of the Philosophical Works of François Hemsterhuis).

(c) research on French historiography of philosophy from Victor Cousin onwards which has led to The Oxford Handbook to Modern French Philosophy, Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France and an edition of Victor Cousin's Philosophical Fragments.

I am currently developing two new projects: (1) a monograph on French historians of philosophy after Cousin with particular emphasis on Ferdinand Alquié and Etienne Souriau (L'Instauration philosophique); (2) a monograph on debates over the philosophy of plant morphology in the work of Wilhelm Troll and Agnes Arber.

For more of a sense of my research, see further my publication website: https://royalholloway.academia.edu/DanielWhistler.