Maria Dimova-Cookson is an Associate Professor in Politics at the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University. She completed her DPhil in Politics on the political philosophy of the British idealists at the University of York. She has previously studied philosophy as an undergraduate at Sofia University and MA in political philosophy at the University of York. Her academic appointments have been at UCL, as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and University of Sheffield as a lecturer in political theory.
Dr Dimova-Cookson’s research focuses on moral and political issues in the history of and contemporary political thought including the dual concept of liberty, positive freedom, justifications of human rights, moral development, value pluralism and multiculturalism. Her 2020 monograph Rethinking Positive and Negative Liberty argues that the distinction between positive and negative freedom remains highly pertinent today, despite having fallen out of fashion in the late twentieth century. It proposes a new reading of this distinction for the twenty-first century, building on the work of Benjamin Constant (1767-1830), T.H. Green (1836-1882) and Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) who led the historical development of these ideas.