About the organisers

Torrey Shanks

Torrey is Associate Professor of Political Theory at the University of Toronto, Scarborough Campus and Graduate Faculty of Political Science. Her research is situated in the history of early modern political thought and feminist theory with an emphasis on property and women’s contributions to political thought. She is the author of Authority Figures: Rhetoric and Experience in John Locke’s Political Thought (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014). She has written on the social contract, self-ownership, property, consent, toleration, rhetorical figures, political imagination, affect, contemporary feminist theory, monsters, John Locke, Michel de Montaigne, Mary Wollstonecraft, Margaret Cavendish, and Patricia Williams.

Torrey is the recipient of a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Insight grant for one of her current research projects on “Improperty” and a SSHRC Connections grant for the 2025 conference in Women in the History of Political Thought.

Geertje Bol

Geertje is a postdoctoral fellow at the history department at Ghent University. In 2022, she completed the D.Phil. in politics at the University of Oxford. Her thesis focused on theories of partisanship in the political thought of Mary Astell and Catharine Macaulay. Currently, at Ghent University, she is working on a history of ambition, with a particular focus on its gendered aspects.

She is the author of Partisan Virtue: The Politics of Inclusion in Eighteenth-Century Women's Political Thought (OUP, 2026). She has also published articles on moderation, ambition, friendship, flattery, as well as an article on the methodology of women's intellectual history. Her aim is to bring early modern women's perspectives to bear on key political concepts.

Mary Jo MacDonald

Mary Jo is Assistant Professor at Mount Allison  University. Prior to t his, she was a postdoc at the University of Jyväskylä as member of the project "Gender in Renaissance and Early Modern Philosophy." In 2023, she successfully defended her PhD dissertation at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation explored how theories of natural equality circulating in the early modern period were taken up by women philosophers to defend the equality of the sexes. Her current research examines the relationship between these early feminist writings and the growth in the transatlantic slave trade.

Her published writing concerns Gabrielle Suchon, Mary Astell, and Judith Drake, and has appeared, or is forthcoming, in American Political Science Review, Political Theory, Polity, and Politics and Gender. She is particularly interested in early modern women's political writings to generate new insights for contemporary debates about equality.