Alumnus Elias Forneris has received the Special Jury Prize as part of the 2025 'Raymond Aron Prize for Research' (PhD Thesis Category).
The prize, awarded by the Société des Amis de Raymond Aron and overseen by Professor Pierre Manent, honours outstanding research by French and international scholars working on the thought of the twentieth-century philosopher Raymond Aron, or in the social sciences he engaged with.
The jury recognised Dr Forneris’s doctoral thesis in History, titled French and Belgian Political Ideas in Wartime Britain, 1940-1944, which was supervised by Professor Patrick Baert and advised by Dr Sylvana Tomaselli. The thesis was successfully defended at the University of Cambridge in June 2025. It expanded upon Dr Forneris’s previous MPhil research at Cambridge conducted under the supervision of Professor Mira Siegelberg.
The thesis offers an intellectual history of four French and Belgian exiles writing in Great Britain during the Second World War: French philosopher Raymond Aron and journalist Maurice Schumann, alongside Belgian politicians Louis de Brouckère and Robert Gillon. Drawing on largely unknown articles and archival material, it traces how these figures planned the rebuilding of Europe’s postwar institutions. Dr Forneris plans to publish his thesis as a book.
Dr Forneris’s other work has featured in the journals French History, the International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society and The Tocqueville Review. He serves on the Editorial Board of The Tocqueville Review | La Revue Tocqueville, and was an editor for the website Tocqueville 21. He is a Fellow of Salzburg Global, an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a member of the Society for the Study of French History.
Article initially published on : https://www.jesus.cam.ac.uk/articles/alumnus-wins-major-thesis-prize
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