Simon Kow

Simon Kow teaches social and political topics in the Early Modern Studies Programme. He grew up in Britain and Calgary, before moving to Ottawa to take his BA in political science. Dr. Kow received both his MA and PhD in political science at the University of Toronto, in 1996 and 2001, respectively. In 2001 Dr. Kow began teaching at the University of King's College as assistant professor in the Early Modern Studies Programme.

Current research projects

Dr. Kow is writing on Enlightenment conceptions of China.

Selected publications

• "Enlightenment Universalism? Bayle and Montesquieu on China." The European Legacy (forthcoming).
• “Politics and Culture in Hume’s History of England”. In Handbook of Enlightenment Historiography, ed. Robert Sparling, Brill Press, forthcoming.
• "Confucianism, Secularism, and Atheism in Bayle and Montesquieu." The European Legacy 16:1 (2011): 39-52.
• Rousseau and Desire, Co-edited volume with Mark Blackell and John Duncan, University of Toronto Press (2009).
• "Rousseau's Mandevillean Conception of Desire and Modern Society."  In Rousseau and Desire, 62-81.
• "Necessitating Justice: Hobbes on Free Will and Punishment." The European Legacy 10:7 (December 2005), 689-702.
• "Corporeal Interiority and the Body Politic in Hobbes's Leviathan." Dalhousie Review 85.2 (Summer 2005), 239-248.
• "Hobbes's Critique of Miltonian Independency." Animus (2004): 37-51.
• "Maistre and Hobbes on Providential History and the English Civil War." Clio 30:3 (2001): 267-288.

Classes taught 

• EMSP3430.03 Theories of Punishment
• EMSP3440.03/CTMP3135.03 Reconstructing Political Modernity
• EMSP2420.03 Virtue, Vice, and the Commercial Society in Early Modern Literature
• EMSP2430.03 The Pursuit of Happiness in Early Modern Culture
• EMSP2450.03 The East is Read: Early Modern Conceptions of Asian Thought
• EMSP2460.03 Images of Modernity in Cinema: Early Modern Stories on Film
• EMSP3420.03 Religious Warfare and Political Theology in the Early Modern Period
• EMSP2470.03 Visions of Renaissance Political Thought in Film
• EMSP2480.03/HIST2750.03 The Pirate and Piracy
• EMSP4000.06X/Y Conceptions of State, Society and Revolution in the Early Modern Period