Dr Simon Townsend

Simon Townsend is a Lecturer in Politics at the University of Exeter, where he holds an Education and Scholarship contract reflecting his commitment to teaching excellence and the scholarly development of higher education practice. He convenes three undergraduate modules: Power and Democracy (POL1019), a large first-year module introducing students to democratic theory and the central debates about how democratic life can be understood and improved; Early Modern Political Thought (POL1026), tracing the canonical tradition from Machiavelli through to Burke and Wollstonecraft; and Radical Political Thinking: Power, Life, Progress (POL3666), engaging continental theory including Foucault and Nietzsche at final-year level. Across all three modules he is committed to designing learning environments that cultivate students' critical thinking and capacity for independent political judgement.

Simon's research focuses on the political dimensions of nineteenth and twentieth-century European thought. His published work centres on Nietzsche's political philosophy, with articles in the European Journal of Philosophy and The Review of Politics examining the Nietzschean ideal-type and Nietzsche's account of political states and the cultivation of higher individuals. He has also published on Georges Bataille's political theory in Theory & Event. His current work argues that Nietzschean aristocracy is fundamentally spiritual and cultural rather than political, and investigates the conditions under which higher individuality might be cultivated — including within democratic contexts.

Alongside his disciplinary research, Simon is developing a programme of educational scholarship at the intersection of generative AI and higher education. This work addresses how the rapid adoption of large language models is transforming the conditions of student learning, academic writing, and assessment — and what this demands of curriculum design, pedagogy, and institutional policy. Drawing on his experience as Academic Conduct Officer for the Politics department, where he leads on academic integrity and misconduct cases, his scholarship engages with questions of AI detection, authorship, and the redesign of assessment for an AI-rich environment. He is interested in how disciplines in the humanities and social sciences can respond to these pressures in ways that deepen rather than diminish the intellectual demands placed on students.