research projects
My work as a political theorist focuses on the relationship between concrete practices and conceptual structures as the material conditions of the political world, with a particular interest in punishment and citizenship discourses. My current research agenda centers on a broader question of the relationship between action and identity, or put differently, the question of the relation between who we are and what we do.
Excess Punishment: State, Citizens, and Felon Disenfranchisement: This is a book manuscript in progress based on my dissertation, a project concerning “felon” as a concept of action, identity, and the specific practices (such as felon disenfranchisement) that constitute the meaning of the term. An abstract and chapter summary of this project is available.
The Pardon in Practice and the History of Political Thought: As an outgrowth of the my work on voting rights, I am interested in how executive clemency and the pardon can reveal the limits of re-integration into political membership. An executive pardon is the only method of restoring voting rights across state jurisdictions in the US, and it is also a recurring theme in the foundations of both liberal and republican political theory, from Hobbes and Locke to Kant, Rousseau, and Hegel. I ask what the pardon reveals about the structure of sovereignty in each of these thinkers, and how that understanding of political authority continues to be articulated in the context of American voting-rights.
Neoliberalism and Punishment: Framed on Michel Foucault’s analysis of the Chicago School of Economics, this is work concerning the development of neo-liberal penality in the United States. While there has been a widespread abandonment of the rehabilitative ideal that characterized much of the 19th and 20th centuries, it is simply not the case that that some newly rational or economic understanding of criminal justice has replaced it, even if contemporary criminology has become dominated by neoliberal assumptions of decision making. Instead, I argue that we find ourselves in a period characterized by overlapping and often contradictory discourses of responsibility and subjectivity, allowing for the deployment of a type of fully responsible monsters. This figure, most visible in the popular perception and legal treatment of sex offenders, characterizes the incoherent, although strategic, milieu of contemporary penality in the United States.
A small part of this project is appears in my piece on Foucault’s 1979 reading of the Chicago School, available on the papers page.
Criminal Subjectivity and the English Experience with Highway Robbery: An historical project tracing the development of subjectivity and political sovereignty in 17th and 18th century English thought and popular culture, particularly the figures of the “outlaw,” “bandit,” and “highwayman.” It is my contention that in order to understand the foundations of liberal political theory, especially that found in thinkers like Locke or Hobbes, we must attend to the liminal figures of political membership who challenged the emergence of well-articulated property-rights.
Disenfranchisement and Race in 19th Century Maryland: A genealogy of criminal disenfranchisement provisions during the 19th century constitutional conventions in the state of Maryland tied to the production of free black labor as a criminal identity.
Gifts, Subjectivity, and the Will: Research project into the status of the will in giving and receiving gifts. This work is based mostly in Hegel at the moment.
Black Youth Project: I worked as a research assistant for Prof. Cathy Cohen’s long term research project into the sexuality, religion, and politics of young African Americans.
