My research focuses, generally speaking, on three areas.
First, I investigate the significance of emotion and affect in the political theory canon and connects the concept of ‘the political’ with ideas of embodiment. This book project, building on my dissertation, develops a method of interpretation informed by affect theory to read Thomas Hobbes, Karl Marx, Simone de Beauvoir, and twentieth century materialist feminism, and others. examining the under-analyzed import of embodied emotion in their works. The project demonstrates that their accounts of subjectivity and power depend upon notions of how politics and emotion intersect.
Second, I draw on recent developments in critical ethnic studies – particularly Afro-Pessimism – to examine current debates in political theory from the perspective of the legacy of slavery. So far, this has taken the form of an article manuscript on anti-black racism, slavery, and biopolitics, and an in-progress paper on the legal writing of Sonia Sotomayor and the Afro-Pessimist concept of “social death.”
Third, I am engaged in several trajectories of research in the political theory of work and labor. These bring feminist scholarship on labor to bear on questions of democratic theory, neoliberalism, domestic labor, and technology.
Peer-Reviewed Publications
- “The ‘Enigma of Biopolitics’: Antiblackness, Modernity, and Roberto Esposito’s Biopolitics,” forthcoming at Political Theory
- “Timely Politics: A Political Theory of Messianic, Evangelical, and Queer Temporalities,” forthcoming at Theory & Event (co-authored)
- “Emotional Orientations: Simone de Beauvoir and Sara Ahmed on Subjectivity and the Emotional Phenomenology of Gender,” philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism 6 (2), 215-240
- “Behavioral Economics as Neoliberalism: Producing and Governing ‘Homo Economicus,’ Contemporary Political Theory 14 (2), 137-158
Invited Book Reviews
- “The Pedagogy of Feminist Theory.” Symposium on The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, ed. Lisa Disch and Mary Hawkesworth (2016), forthcoming in Politics & Gender 14 (1), March 2018
Manuscripts under review
- “The ‘Enigma of Biopolitics’: Antiblackness, Modernity, and Roberto Esposito’s Biopolitics”; under review after revise and resubmit at Political Theory
- “Vital Forces: Marx and the Tension of Capitalist Affect”; under review at Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association
- “Black, White and Blue Masculinity: Raced and Gendered Insights into Police Shootings of Black Men”; revise and resubmit at Men & Masculinities
Public Writing
- “Sara Ahmed and the Cultural Politics of Emotion,” Public Intellectual Project, Beloit College Liberal Arts in Practice Center
- “Do Government Incentives Make Us Bad Citizens?,” Boston Review, July 19, 2016
- “Training for Neoliberalism,” Boston Review, July 15, 2015
