Monday 01 December 2025: 2023 Ramsay Scholar Jack Jacobs is an historian and political theorist with a keen interest in cultural and political reform. After graduating from the University of Sydney with a BA with First Class Honours in Philosophy, he was a Yindyamarra Research Fellow at Charles Sturt University. There, he worked with high-profile broadcaster and thought leader Stan Grant on ways to improve Australian democracy, by achieving better outcomes for Indigenous people. Jack also worked on the Australian Human Rights Commission’s review of Federal Parliament’s workplace culture, and on culture reviews of university residential colleges.
With his Ramsay Postgraduate Scholarship, Jack completed a Master of Studies in History at the University of Oxford, exploring and comparing Edmund Burke and Mahatma Gandhi’s approaches to reforming Empire. He has now progressed to a Doctorate examining how Simone Weil and George Orwell, two major European thinkers of the 1930s and 40s, received, adapted and challenged Mahatma Gandhi’s ideas through their own reflections on imperialism and totalitarianism.
Reflecting on his scholarship, Jack said it has enabled him to undertake a life-altering education and given him the intellectual foundation to contribute to the wider worlds of letters, politics and foreign affairs. It has propelled his journalistic career, with articles published in several prestigious international publications. And it has gifted him a community of Ramsay Scholars who share his curiosity and ambitions.
In his own words:
The Ramsay Scholarship has enabled me to undertake a life-altering education in a global setting, giving me the intellectual foundation from which to contribute not only to Australia’s public life, but also to the wider worlds of letters, politics, and foreign affairs.
I was drawn to the Scholarship because the Ramsay Centre takes the humanities seriously. It should represent a tradition of Western scholarship that encourages students to think for themselves and to engage with the past as an inheritance: something one must constantly test themselves against, measure, question, and renew through study, critical reflection, and reform. I applied for this scholarship because I saw it as the right means to take me to Oxford and to support the kind of humane, historically informed intellectual life I hope to lead.
What I especially value about Oxford is its global community. Having friends and teachers from all over the world completely shifts your sense of where and how ideas travel. In Australia, it can sometimes feel as if our imaginations need only end at the water’s edge; Oxford doesn’t quite let you get away with that luxury. You’re constantly challenged to think about what ideas born in one context mean for places you may never have visited. In that way, Oxford has given me a real appetite for travel, for foreign affairs, and for thinking about Australia in a much larger global frame once I bolt over Oxford’s monastery walls.
Still, studying at Oxford, especially doing a DPhil, can be a dauntingly isolating experience. You’re trusted to disappear into the wilderness of thought and come back with a serious piece of scholarship, chipping away at it over what feels like a very long and very short time all at once. It’s ultimately a confrontation with yourself: you have to develop real intellectual resources – in my case historical, philosophical, and biographical ones – and apply them to complex problems. The chance to encounter so closely the minds of thinkers like George Orwell, Simone Weil, Mahatma Gandhi, and Edmund Burke is a privilege I don’t take lightly. I know I won’t quite get the chance to do this deep work and reflection again, untouched, as I am, by the affairs of life.
I’ve just successfully passed my Transfer of Status with “no corrections” for my DPhil in Intellectual History at Oxford, which means I’ve entered my second year and am now deep into the difficult writing phase. My Masters research in Intellectual History, which was also generously supported by the Ramsay Centre, focussed on the influence of the 18th century political reformer, Edmund Burke, on Mahatma Gandhi’s political thought. My DPhil research similarly works at the intersection of Western and Indian thought. I’m studying how Simone Weil and George Orwell, two major European thinkers of the 1930s and 40s, received, adapted, and challenged Mahatma Gandhi’s ideas through their own reflections on imperialism and totalitarianism. In particular, I’m interested in what it means to be engaged in politics while keeping one’s moral integrity fully in view, and how these three thinkers – each in very different ways – brought together non-violence, religion, and global questions of empire. I hope for this DPhil thesis to become the basis of my first non-fiction book aimed at a wider, general readership.
A highlight at Oxford has been a surprise to me – teaching. This year, I’ve begun tutoring final-year undergraduates in History at Oxford on a Special Subject – the capstone subject in their course – that is primary-source driven and ranges widely across Indian political thought from Gandhi’s assassination in 1948 to The Emergency of Indira Gandhi in 1975. It has been both a challenge and a joy to discover that knowledge, thought, and writing are not narrowly self-reflective pursuits, but also treasures to be shared with others. I never expected to want to be a teacher or to imagine a place, at least in part, for myself in academia. But teaching Oxford students at a high level this year has genuinely shifted my trajectory.
My academic highlight has been working with my two supervisors, Professor Ruth Harris, a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, and Professor Faisal Devji, the new Beit Chair in Global and Imperial History. Being supervised by two historians working at the height of their imaginative and intellectual powers has made the DPhil feel like a genuine team endeavour. I feel like I have my very own academic cabinet at my back, committed to my well-being and intellectual development. As a young scholar, I’m learning not only how to think, but how to research and live as a serious, disciplined historian. This focussed and sustained intellectual companionship is an intimate experience of study that I did not experience in a formal setting before Oxford.
Life has also been rich beyond the books. My partner now lives with me in the UK, which has been a huge joy; we’ve been able to travel together in Britain and Europe, which offers a wonderful counterpoint to the intensity of study in Oxford. I’ve also taken on leadership roles. I co-run the South Asian Intellectual History Seminar at Oxford, and I continue to co-host the Yindyamarra podcast with my friend Stan Grant in Australia, who has visited me several times now in Oxford. That work keeps me rooted in Australian public life and reminds me that my intellectual commitments are grounded in a particular soil and set of values. Patrick White, that great gum tree of Australian letters, once said that while his heart was in London, his blood was Australian; I feel much the same. My long-term ambition is still to return home and contribute to public life.
Alongside my studies, my journalistic career has begun to take off. I’ve published my first long review essay in the ‘Times Literary Supplement’, one of London’s leading literary magazines for whom writers such as Orwell, T. S. Eliot, and V. S. Naipaul have written, and I’ve contributed to established American magazines such as ‘Dissent’ and ‘Psyche’. I am currently working on a review-essay of two books on revolution – ranging across China, Russia, and French themes – for the ‘Los Angeles Review of Books’. These opportunities have allowed me to test my ideas in public and begin the kind of writing life I hope to continue after the DPhil.
Being part of the Ramsay community abroad is both wonderful and sustaining. You never quite feel alone, because you’re surrounded by people who share your curiosity and ambitions. One of my closest friends, Celeste van Gent, is herself a Ramsay Scholar studying Medieval History at Oxford, whom I first met in Sydney at my first Ramsay induction. Being here together at Oxford and supporting one another through the ups and downs of postgraduate life is one of the great joys of this community.
Each new cohort of Ramsay Scholars who arrive in Oxford feels like an extension of that story. It’s a privilege to welcome them into our circles – into restaurants, seminars, and long conversations about politics and ideas – and to see how the scholarship is evolving in its values and in the diversity of its scholars with each and every year iteration. There’s a real sense of continuity and legacy, but also of learning from those coming after us. That feeling of belonging to a living, growing community is, for me, one of the best reasons to apply for the Ramsay Scholarship.
Post Oxford my plans are, in essence, the same as they were before I arrived, but they now carry a greater sense of weight and urgency. I want to be a writer – a historian, journalist, and podcaster – who is deeply engaged with the worlds of politics and public life. I hope to work at the intersection of universities, government, media, foreign affairs, and think tanks, helping to shape public discussion around ideas and political reform.
I see this work unfolding both at home and abroad: not only in London, but in the new and sometimes fragile centres of global power, where freedom is under strain and violence is on the rise in parts of Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Ultimately, though, I hope my most meaningful contributions will be in Australia. I harbour a long-standing ambition to live a literary life and to write in a way that, as Orwell put it, tries to turn writing about politics into a high art. That aspiration was set in motion when I first read Edmund Burke, a thinker and a doer, as a teenager, and I hope, in my own way, to play a similar role in my country and in the wider world.
Interested in a Ramsay Postgraduate Scholarship? Our scholarships support young Australian leaders to study at the world’s best overseas universities and are valued at up to AUD$100,000 p.a. https://ramsaypostgradscholarship.com/
To read more about Jack Jacobs and his cohort of 2023 Ramsay Postgraduate Scholars go to: https://ramsaypostgradscholarship.com/scholars/
Media contact: Sarah Switzer0407 816 098 / sarah.switzer@ramsaycentre.org