Ruth Scurr

Ruth Scurr (born 1971, London) is a British writer and historian.

She was admitted to Oxford University to read English but changed after a year to study Politics and Philosophy. She went on to study for a Master’s degree in Social and Political Theory and then completed a doctorate thesis on the political thought of the French Revolution, both at Cambridge University. After this she received a British Academy Post-doctoral Research Fellowship in the Department of Politics at Cambridge. In 1996 she spent a year in Paris at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. She began reviewing regularly for "The Times" and the "Times Literary Supplement" in 1997. Since then she has written for "The Daily Telegraph", "The Observer", The New Statesman, The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, "The Nation" and "The New York Observer".

Scurr is an affiliated lecturer in the Department of Politics at Cambridge University, and Director of Studies in Social and Political Sciences for Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge where she is a Fellow. She was a judge on the Booker Prize in 2007. Since 1997 she has been married to the political theorist John Dunn.

Works

*"Fatal Purity – Robespierre and the French Revolution" (Chatto and Windus, 2006)