About our staff

I read history at St John’s College, Cambridge, graduating with a PhD in 1999. I then worked in the Munich office of an international management consultancy, before accepting a three-year research fellowship at Edinburgh which was funded by the Leverhulme Trust. I was appointed to a lectureship in History in 2005, and subsequently promoted to Senior Lecturer, Reader, and Professor.

I have been the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and the Max-Planck Institut für Geschichte in Göttingen. In 2010 – 2011 I was the Rosanna and Charles Jaffin Founders’ Circle Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 2019 I was a Shinhan Distinguished Visiting Professor at Yonsei University in South Korea 

From 2022 to 2025 I am PI on a research project, funded jointly by the AHRC and the DFG, on 'Rethinking Enlightenment: the Reception of John Locke in Germany'.

• General Editor, Intellectual History Review
• Editorial board member, Grotiana
• Editorial board member, Journal of Scottish Thought

Booking link for office hours

Summary of research interests

• Britain & Ireland
• Europe
• Scotland

• Culture
• Ideas
• Medicine, Science & Technology
• Politics
• Religion

• Early Modern
• Eighteenth Century

I work on the intellectual history of early modern Europe, focusing mainly on the German-speaking lands and Britain from c. 1650 to c. 1820. One of my aims is to integrate the discussion of early modern religious thought into intellectual history more generally. Another has been to examine the connections between different intellectual disciplines in the early modern period, when any one area of inquiry and debate, such as religion, science, or morality, cannot be understood in isolation from others. This approach is reflected in my first book, a study of the early Enlightenment thinker Christian Thomasius, who wrote on matters as diverse as heresy, history, Roman Law, morality and natural science.

I have published articles and book chapters on a range of subjects such as religion and Enlightenment, the history of toleration, notions of punishment in early modern moral philosophy, Enlightenment responses to the intellectual heritage of classical antiquity, and the reception of Newtonian science in Germany. I have edited and translated several early modern texts on law and moral philosophy. I co-edited, with the late Susan Manning, a volume of essays on Character, Self and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment. My most recent monograph is The Moral Culture of the Scottish Enlightenment, 1690 - 1805.

I have an interest in the reception of classical Greek and Roman thought in the Enlightenment. In 2009 I co-organized (with Michael Lurie and Hannah Dawson) an international conference on Lucretius in the European Enlightenments. This was followed by a series of workshops, organized with Colin Kidd, which was funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh. The purpose of these meetings was to examine the importance of the critical engagement with classical antiquity for the culture and thought of Enlightenment Scotland. 

I am currently writing a book about the reception of Newton and Newtonianism in eighteenth-century Germany. The aim of this study is to present the responses to Newton’s ideas in Enlightenment Germany as part of a more general intellectual history of eighteenth-century erudition, scholarship and philosophy, the concerns of which extend far beyond those of ‘science’ in a narrow sense. It is now well known that eighteenth-century natural philosophers were not constrained by the same disciplinary boundaries as we are. And yet, there is no comprehensive study of the responses to Newton in eighteenth-century Germany which reflects this fact.

I have recently been working on the reception of Newtonianism in the German-speaking lands, from the publication of Newton's Principia in 1687 to the early nineteenth century. This research has been supported by a grant from the Leverhulme Trust.

Watch a short video of Dr Ahnert speaking about his rearch interests - Media Hopper

• Intellectual History from Montesquieu to Marx (3/4 Option)

• Enlightenment Scotland, c. 1690 – c. 1800 (4MA)

• Early Modern History: a Connected World

• The 'Science of Man' in the Scottish Enlightenment

I have supervised (as primary, co-, or second supervisor) more than twenty successfully completed PhD dissertations 

Early modern European intellectual history, c. 1600 - 1830

Process of intellectual transmission and reception

The European Enlightenments

Religion and secularisation in the early modern period

The intellectual history of early modern philosophy