Peter De Bolla

Biographic Data

ID1380843
NAMEPeter De Bolla
GIVEN NAMESPeter
FAMILY NAMEDe Bolla
SIGNATUREDE BOLLA P
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of Cambridge
ORCID0000-0002-0636-6789
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS18
TOTAL CITATIONS6
WORKS AS AUTHOR15
WORKS AS EDITOR3
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1986
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2025
H-INDEX2

  • On Concepts as Historical Forms

    Open AccessPeter De BollaARTICLEHistory and Theory2025

    What are the consequences of holding fast to the axiom that words are not the same thing as concepts? This article explores some of them in relation to the tensions between two different but overlapping approaches to the history of concepts: philology and computationally informed historical semantics. The methods utilized were developed in the Cambridge Concept Lab and essentially comprise a measurement for word associations that can then be expo…

  • Republicanism”

    Open AccessPeter De BollaARTICLEIntellectual History Review2023References: 4

    This essay revisits the long-standing debate concerning the sources for the underlying political beliefs and commitments held by the “founding generation,” those colonists who came to the conclusion that separation from the mother country was necessary and inevitable. It uses a mixed mode of enquiry and analysis, blending standard close reading of texts with computer-aided inspection of the archive at scale. It seeks to clarify the extent to whic…

  • Pierre Bonnard

    Peter De BollaARTICLEboundary 22022

    The French artist Pierre Bonnard created more than two thousand paintings, many of them now dispersed around museums across the world. He painted in a slightly eccentric manner—on unstretched canvas—and often worked on these paintings over decades. They typically depict closed spaces, interiors, that open out to vistas beyond the room. He also produced a number of self-portraits and a very large number of paintings depicting his muse, Marthe, oft…

  • The Idea of Liberty, 1600-1800

    Peter De Bolla, Ewan Jones et al.ARTICLEJournal of the History of Ideas2020Cited by: 2

    This article uses computational and statistical methods for analyzing the concept of liberty 1600-1800. Based on a bespoke set of tools for parsing conceptual structures it contributes to the literature on the concept of liberty and engages with the thesis concerning negative liberty first put forward by Isaiah Berlin and subsequently modified by Quentin Skinner

  • The Uses of Genre

    Ryan Healey, Ewan Jones et al.ARTICLERepresentations2020

    This paper presents a computational method for assessing the uses of the category "genre." It takes as its example the long-standing "Adam Smith" problem, which seeks to settle whether Smith's two major works, The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations are compatible with each other and can be seen as contributing to a larger "system" of inquiry embarked upon by Smith

  • Distributional Concept Analysis

    Peter De Bolla, Ewan Jones et al.ARTICLEContributions to the History of…2019Cited by: 4References: 2

    This article proposes a novel computational method for discerning the structure and history of concepts. Based on the analysis of co-occurrence data in large data sets, the method creates a measure of "binding" that enables the construction of verbal constellations that comprise the larger units, "concepts," that change over time. In contrast to investigation into semantic networks, our method seeks to uncover structures of conceptual operation t…

  • The Local Eye

    Peter De BollaARTICLEOxford Art Journal2015

    Journal Article The Local Eye Get access John Barrell, Edward Pugh of Ruthin 1763–1813: ‘A Native Artist’ (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), 140 colour illns, 245pp., ISBN 9780708325674, paperback £19.99. Peter de Bolla Peter de Bolla [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Oxford Art Journal, Volume 38, Issue 3, December 2015, Pages 444–448, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/kcv019 Published…

  • On the conceptual incoherence of universal human rights

    Open AccessPeter De BollaARTICLECritical Quarterly2014

  • Sublime

    Andrew Ashfield, Peter De BollaBOOKSublime2012

  • Mediation and the Division of Labor

    Peter De BollaCHAPTERThis Is Enlightenment2010

  • Rights and Sentiments

    Peter De BollaARTICLEHistory Workshop Journal2009

    On Tuesday 19 February 2008 the Guardian's front-page coverage of the collapse of the bank, Northern Rock, included the following: Ministers are prepared, however, to face down threats of a legal challenge from Northern Rock's shareholders, who said yesterday that the government's plan for a temporary period of state ownership infringed their human rights.

  • The Time of Law

    Peter De BollaARTICLESubStance2006

    The Time of Law:Eighteenth-Century Speculations Peter de Bolla (bio) In the great shift from the theocentric to the skeptical ordering of knowledge that is Enlightenment, one way of knowing stands out as preeminent, as the exemplar for the entire mathesis of modernity. There is a moment, a precise point at which this shift becomes visible, stabilizing the slow-moving plate tectonics of epistemological contest in a discursive daguerreotype whose s…

  • Land, Nation and Culture, 1740–1840

    Open AccessPeter De Bolla, Nigel Leask et al.EDITORBOOKLand, Nation and Culture, 1740-18402005

    Over the last twenty years, critics and historians of the late Eighteenth-century have developed a multidisciplinary approach to the history of culture. This dialogue between literary critics and theo

  • Land, Nation and Culture, 1740-1840

    D Simpson, N Leask et al.BOOKLand, Nation and Culture, 1740-18402005

  • Remembering Edward Said

    Open AccessPeter De BollaARTICLEComparative Critical Studies2004

  • The Sublime

    Open AccessAndrew Ashfield, Peter De BollaEDITORBOOKSublime1996

    This collection of texts on the Sublime provides the historical context for the foundation and discussion of one of the most important aesthetic debates of the Enlightenment. The significance of the Sublime in the eighteenth century ranged across a number of fields - literary criticism, empirical psychology, political economy, connoisseurship, landscape design and aesthetics, painting and the fine arts, and moral philosophy - and has continued to…

  • The Sublime

    Andrew Ashfield, Peter De BollaEDITORBOOKSublime1996

  • Disfiguring History

    Peter De Bolla, Hayden White et al.ARTICLEdiacritics1986