Research

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 in-progress papers on the legal writing of Sonia Sotomayor in relation to African-American political thought.

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

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

Public Writing