Academic Profile

Research Interests: Equality and Discrimination; Republican Non-Domination and Freedom; Secularism and Religion; Democratic Theory and Rights.

Cécile Laborde holds the Nuffield Chair of Political Theory and is a Fellow of the British Academy.

Before she joined Oxford in January 2017, she was a Professor of Political Theory at University College London. After studying political science in France, Cécile Laborde obtained a DPhil from Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, in 1996. She has held permanent posts in political theory at the University of Exeter and King's College, London. In 2007, she was Associate Professor to the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She spent the 2010-11 academic year in Princeton, as a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study. She was the director of UCL’s Religion and Political Theory Centre, which was funded by a European Research Council (ERC) personal grant.

She has published extensively in the areas of republicanism, liberalism and religion, theories of law and the state, and global justice. She is the author of 5 monographs and has written articles in major journals of political science and political theory. She is notably the author of Pluralist Thought and the State in Britain and France (2000), Critical Republicanism. The Hijab Controversy in Political Philosophy (2008), and Liberalism’s Religion, which was published by Harvard University Press in 2017 and was awarded the 2019 Spitz Prize.

Cécile's last book, Philosophie libérale de la religion, was published in Paris (Hermann/Raison Publique) in April 2023. In December 2022, she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Belgium. 

Cécile Laborde is the convenor of the Nuffield political theory workshop.