Assistant Professor

Office: PGH 441A

Email: jafreed@central.uh.edu

Research Interests

Constitutional Theory

Theories of Rights

Medieval, Rennaissance, and Early Modern Political Thought

Biographical Summary

Dr. Joshua Freed is a historian of political thought and legal historian. Dr. Freed specializes in reading medieval, renaissance, and early modern legal texts as archives for political thought, as well as constitutional theory and theories of rights. 

His first book manuscript, Ghost of the Empire: Church, Law, and Civil Society, 1300-1650, offers a revisionist account for reading the rights and powers of religious institutions. His second book project, titled Accountability: A Legal and Theological History, tells the history of two rival conceptions of accountability that clashed in European social, legal, and theological thought, from Anglo-Saxon England, to Pufendorf, and to Nuremberg. The book argues, in part, that the winning view—prioritizing punishment—is not only a contingent winner, but one which limits the vocabulary of accountability as applied to international politics, electoral politics, and individual identity.   

Dr. Freed also works on the relationship between language and political philosophy after the linguistic turn, with a focus on non-liberal solidarity.

Dr. Freed welcomes applications for Masters and PhD students who are interested in a rigorous historical methodological training to doing intellectual history, and/or those who are interested in the law. 

At UH, Dr. Freed teaches: Intro to Political Theory, Foundations of American Political Thought, Left Right and Center, Politics and the Death of God (Secularization and Politics), and, for graduate students, Contemporary Political Theories of Justice, Methodology for Political Theory, and History of Political Thought (Renaissance to Early Modern, and Early Modern to Modern). 

Before Houston, Dr. Freed was the Clayman Junior Research Fellow in Political Thought at St Annes College, Oxford University. His PhD is from the University of California, Berkeley.  

Selected Publications

“Mixed Property and Mixed Labor: The Law of Locke’s Original Appropriation”, Journal of the History of Ideas, 87.3 (Forthcoming July 2026). 
“Baptism and Civic-Membership in Medieval and Early Modern Law”. History of Political Thought, 45(2), 229-256.
“Jurisdiction, Territory, Sovereignty: Giulio Pace and the Dominion of the Sea”, in Sovereignty: European and Global Histories, 1400-1800 (October 23, 2024), eds. Cornel Zwierlein and Daniel Lee. Brill.