Teaching

An interview about my teaching in the Reed Quest (link)

Introduction to Political Theory and the History of Political Thought

Reed College, Spring 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025

This course is an introductory and selective survey of the history of political thought from Ancient Greece to modern Europe and North America. Texts may include Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Sieyès, Burke, J.S. Mill, Marx, Douglass, Du Bois, Weber, Fanon, Beauvoir, and Arendt. Our approach is at once historical, textual, and conceptual. We examine the philosophies these thinkers develop, defend and criticize (the logic of their claims, the underlying commitments, assumptions and implications), and explore the political issues they pose today. But we also keep in view the historical contexts in which they wrote: the rise and decline of Athens as a democracy and imperial power; the English civil war and democratic revolutions; the development of industrial capitalism and expanding individual rights; the legacies of slavery and colonialism.

Science, Politics, and Authority (Syllabus)

Reed College, Fall 2025

“What do we want? Evidence-based policy! When do we want it? After peer review!” was a rallying cry against the Trump Administration’s attack on the EPA. How did this vision of science as a guide and resource for democratic politics emerge and consolidate? Does it remain compelling? If it isn’t, how can and should science serve democracy? This course investigates how science became a powerful source of political and cultural authority, how it has disgraced and redeemed itself, weathered storms and fallen into crisis. We begin with some early-modern pioneers and their instruments: Francis Bacon’s rack and Galileo Galilei’s telescope. We’ll encounter doubters and warnings: Giambattista Vico on the madness of rationality and Mary Shelley’s monsters. We’ll look at institutions and technologies of credibility, from the laboratory and the witnessing public to the origins of peer review and the footnote. At scientific selves, epistemic virtues, and the many modes of objectivity. We’ll learn how science got it’s Janus face: public and protected, open and inaccessible, a model of civility and a fortress of exclusion. We survey science gone bad (eugenics, nuclear weapons, big data surveillance) and ask about future fallout. Will AI kill us all, or just take our jobs? Is geoengineering nutty (space mirrors!) or necessary (Negative Emissions Technologies)? We’ll meet postmodern pranksters (Bruno Latour), liars (election deniers), concern trolls (vaccine skeptics), and repentant sinners (Latour, again). We’ll fret about fraud and ponder Psychology’s replication crisis. We’ll see science on stage, science at the bar, science in the streets (ACT UP), and science in retreat. This will be a wild ride through treacherous terrain. “Science is Real,” the lawn signs say. But is it authoritative? And can it be democratic?

Earth, Nature, World (developed with support from the Mellon Environmental Humanities Incubator)

Reed College, Spring 2026

Hannah Arendt called earth “the quintessence of the human condition” and a “free gift from nowhere.” With the invention of the atom bomb the launch of Sputnik, she worried about the fate of the world amidst accelerating earth alienation. This course takes up those fears (and looks for hope) in relation to contemporary crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, and resource depletion. We begin with conceptions of nature in Aristotle, Bacon, Vico, and Spinoza. We then turn to contemporary debates about the relationship between humans and nature, organized around the concepts of representation and justice. Finally, we consider how the concepts of the Anthropocene and technosphere are reconfiguring our understanding of Earth, and the “world picture” coming into view through the lens of Earth Systems Science, climate modeling, and astrobiology. We will read essays from Husserl, Heidegger and Arendt alongside literature from the “planetary turn” in the humanities and social sciences. Political theory has been called a “mongrel discipline” and the same can be said of Environmental Humanities. So we will keep in mind methodological and substantive questions about the relationship of the humanities to the natural and social sciences.

Contemporary Democratic Theory (Syllabus)

Reed College, Fall 2024

This course is an advanced introduction to debates in contemporary democratic theory. While we begin with democracy’s ancient origins and early modern precursors, the focus is on contemporary theories and dilemmas of modern democratic politics. During the first half of the course, we examine a variety of theories of democracy: minimalism and competitive elitism; pluralist and participatory; representative and deliberative; agonistic and radical. In the second half, we turn to a set of challenges that democratic politics and polities face today. Topics include the legitimacy of “The People” and constituent power; membership and democracy’s boundary problem; parties and partisanship; the rise of illiberal democracy and populist movements; inequality in the context of capitalism and neoliberalism; corruption and oligarchy; legacies of colonialism and racial domination in America; disenfranchisement and mass incarceration; and technocratic challenges. We conclude by considering sources of democratic hope in a time of crisis. Throughout, the course brings theory into conversation with empirical research in American politics.

Democracy and Data (Syllabus)

Stanford University, Spring 2021; Reed College, Spring 2022

This course explores the historical entanglement of democracy with data. Modern states and representative governments have always depended on (and often pioneered) new techniques of generating and using data. Today, emerging uses of big data—for mass surveillance, algorithmic decision-making, and to disseminate mis- or disinformation—pose fundamental challenges to democratic values like freedom, equality, and accountability. We begin by historicizing big data as a resource for democratic politics, examining the history of political arithmetic practiced by early modern states, and considering the ideal of the democratic public sphere that emerged in the eighteenth century. We then turn to the construction of informational persons and the mass public in twentieth-century America, via the census and public opinion polling. The second half of the course focuses on three contemporary issues: First, big data surveillance by corporations and states for marketing, governance, and security. Second, the use of algorithmic prediction and decision-making, particularly as these practices relate to the construction of identity and the reproduction of inequality. Finally, we will critically assess anxieties about information disorder in today’s digital public sphere (filter bubbles and personalized voter-targeting on Facebook; Russian bots and sock-puppets on Twitter; Youtube’s radicalizing recommendation algorithm). Literature will be drawn from a range of disciplines, including science and technology studies, communication and media studies, and political theory. Throughout, we will consider how big data and computational technologies might lead us to rethink central concepts in political theory, including consent and freedom; property and (self-)ownership; identity and difference; security, privacy, and the commons.

Body Politics (Syllabus)

Reed College, Fall 2022, Fall 2023, Fall 2023 (Master in the Liberal Arts)

This course examines the politics of embodiment in relation to gender, race, class, sexuality, and ability. We consider the ways that bodies are marked as deviant, abnormal, and/or pathological, and explore where processes of sexed, raced, gendered, and able-bodied normalization intersect and diverge. We engage conceptual and normative debates about controversial bodily practices (autonomy and alienation in prostitution and pornography; biocapital in surrogacy and organ donation; the self and genetic ancestry testing; the ethics of hunger striking and the weaponization of the body) from a range of perspectives: liberal humanist, radical and Marxist feminist, phenomenological and performative, intersectional and new materialist. Topics range from the marriage contract, domestic labor, and reproductive justice; to turn-of-the-century sexology and the modern freak show; the science of homosexuality, the pleasures of trans and queer embodiment, and the biopolitics of AIDS.

Foucault: Power, Subjectivity, Truth (Syllabus)

Reed College, Spring 2023

This course is an introduction to the work of one of the twentieth-century’s most influential thinkers, Michel Foucault (1926–84). We begin with his “genealogical” studies, Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality vol. I, focusing on the relationship between power, knowledge, and subjectivity in modernity. We will also address questions of method, including the influence of Nietzsche. Turning to Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France in the latter half of the 1970s, we will consider how biopower, apparatuses of security, and neoliberal governmentality intersect in the contemporary politics of mass incarceration, digital surveillance, and pandemic response. Finally, we will assess Foucault’s “ethical turn” (the care of the self, an aesthetics of existence, and parrhesia or fearless speech) in terms of its possibilities and limitations for political thought and action. Throughout, we will attend to a variety of challenges posed by Foucault’s critics, including historians (on how we think, write, and deploy history); critical theorists (on the legacy of the Enlightenment); and feminists (on oppression, agency, and liberation). Conference.

Heidegger and Arendt at the Movies

Reed College, Master of Arts in Liberal Studies (Summer 2026)

Edmund Husserl called earth “the originary ark.” Martin Heidegger wrote that earth must not be associated with “the merely astronomical idea of a planet.” After the launch of Sputnik, Hannah Arendt called earth “the quintessence of the human condition,” a “free gift from nowhere” that we now wish to exchange for something we have made ourselves. All three were worried about the fate of the world once we left earth and ventured into space. This course takes up these anxieties from the perspective of our own world by placing them in conversation with science, art, and film. What “world picture” comes into focus through the lens of Earth System Science, contemporary climate modeling, and astrobiology? Primary texts are “The Age of the World Picture,” “The Origins of the Work of Art” and “The Question Concerning Technology,” the final chapter of The Human Condition, along with excerpts from Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences and Alexandre Koyré’s From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. Our contemporary archive includes images of the earth from space, the concepts of the Anthropocene and technosphere, the history of climate modeling and the future of geoengineering, the films Koyaanisqatsi and Gravity, and Yinka Shonibare’s Refugee Astronaut. No scientific or technical knowledge is required – only curiosity and a sense of wonder.

The Human Condition (Syllabus)

Reed College, Fall 2021, Spring 2025

This course undertakes a systematic study of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958), both in its own terms and as a portal into the history of the modern West. We will examine the book’s architecture, along with its conceptual apparatus: earth and world alienation; the vita activa and vita contemplativa; the conditions of natality, mortality, and plurality; the activities of labor, work, and action; the realms of public, private, and the social. We will explore the contexts Arendt invokes—including the ancient world and early modern science—as well as those she doesn’t. That is, we will read in light of Arendt’s own experience: as a German emigre in Cold War America, writing in the shadow of the Nazi death camps and the atom bomb; witnessing the expansion of the welfare state, the acceleration of automation, and the launch of Sputnik. Finally, we will locate the work intertextually, critically assessing Arendt’s readings of Marx, Heidegger, and others.

Hannah Arendt and The Origins of Totalitarianism

Reed College, Fall 2022

Hannah Arendt was one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, and her book The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) is habitually invoked as one of the century’s most important works of nonfiction. The aim of this class is to provide entry to Arendt’s thought and to the history and theory of totalitarianism by way of a close reading of her seminal work and some of its historical and philosophical intertexts. Arendt’s work addresses topics like the rise of anti-Semitism and race thinking in nineteenth-century Europe, mass politics, propaganda, mob-elite alliances, the concentration camp, and terror as a mode of government. We will also consider texts from some of the leading thinkers of Arendt’s time attracted to authoritarianism, such as Carl Schmitt, Georges Bataille, Ernst Jünger, and the Italian futurists. Last, we will consider the reception and extension of Arendt’s work in postwar arguments about Zionism, Nazi criminality, and the Cold War. Throughout, we will ask if Arendt’s work can help us understand contemporary movements in the United States and Europe that explicitly or implicitly seek a renovation of totalitarian rule.

Who Counts? Enumeration, Representation, Democracy

Reed College, Fall 2023

Counting is woven into the fabric of democratic politics. Modern states and representative governments have always depended on (and often pioneered) new enumerative techniques. The U.S. Census, for example, constructs the population as both an object to be managed and as a subject-"The People"-amenable to representation. Elections harness aggregation to put representatives' claims to the test. Polls and crowd estimates seek to measure and articulate public opinion. Politicians, activists, and journalists build narratives out of numbers. We begin with a theoretical and historical overview of counting, along with allied practices of categorizing, classifying, and commensurating. In the abstract, counting appears relatively straightforward; in the political field it is contentious and consequential. Counts are technical and narrative achievements embedded in disciplinary fields, reliant on technologies and instruments, systems of registration and surveillance, and fragile networks of trust. We then turn to attempts to understand the elusive concept of representation, from Hobbes to contemporary democratic theorists. Finally, we examine the relationship between counting and representing across four sites: the census, public opinion polling, voting, and crowd estimation.

Modernity’s Discontents (Syllabus)

This course explores modernity politically and theoretically (and as a source of both inspiration and dread), in the works of four nineteenth century European thinkers: Hegel (1770-1831), Tocqueville (1805-1859), Marx (1818-1883), and Nietzsche (1844-1900). We will use the following themes as a matrix for reading these texts and for thinking about modernity and its dilemmas: (1) History: a new consciousness of time, of transformation, and of progress; (2) Democracy: popular sovereignty, political freedom, contending principles of liberty and social equality, and the emergence of mass society; (3) Capitalism: the industrial revolution, the social impact of a market economy, alienation and class struggle; (4) Subjectivity: questions of individuality, autonomy, and recognition; the interplay between social structure and personal experience; and the private realm of intimacy and the family.

Senior Thesis Syllabus (syllabus)

Reed College, 2021-22; 2022-23

The Public and the (Knowledge) Commons

This advanced seminar will situate contemporary questions about public knowledge and collaborative knowledge-making within the history of “the commons,” from Roman law to contemporary intellectual property regimes. Historically, how have the traditional commons of things and resources been conceived in different contexts? How has materiality figured in accounts of the commons—from forests and fisheries to public spaces? What is the relation between commons and infrastructure (harbors, roads, borders)? Or the standardization of weights and measures, even of time and space? What authorities have secured the status of the commons as common? And on what basis have commons been formed, contested, enclosed or destroyed? We will then consider the emerging knowledge commons—from open access software, to academic publications, digital public spaces, and resources like Wikipedia. What material and immaterial infrastructures (from source code to codes of behavior) support these new commons, and what affordances are built into them? What old or new forms of authority stabilize them? Finally, we will examine the various configurations of human actors that form around the commons. How are communities associated with resource commons similar and different to the publics, counter-publics, crowds and multitudes associated with the making, dissemination, reception and contestation of common knowledge?

Facing Catastrophe

This course examines four global catastrophic risks facing humanity on a planetary scale: nuclear war; synthetic biology and pandemics; climate change; and Artificial Intelligence. We approach these problems from a variety of perspectives. We consider philosophical questions like: should we care about the human future and, if so, why? What do we owe to distant others, including future generations? What does it mean to value nature and non-human creatures? We turn to the social sciences to illuminate why we struggle to respond to—or even to think clearly about—these threats. Research on collective action problems and path dependence can inform our approach to climate change. Game theory illuminates the intractability of nuclear deterrence and the challenge of disarmament. Biases and heuristics help explain our failure to prepare for a global pandemic, or to reckon with the uncertain implications of Artificial Intelligence and autonomous technologies. Political theorists have thought about how we take action in contexts of normative and practical uncertainty. We also consider the various technological futures depicted in speculative literature and film, and how these may help us think differently about the fate of the earth… and our own.

Contemporary Struggles and Political Theory (Syllabus)

In each iteration of this course, we read recently published books that explore contemporary sites of political controversy and struggle in the United States. Out topics this year are: capitalism and neoliberalism; racial justice in America; prison abolition; Indigenous anti-colonialism; global policing; and digital technologies. We use these works and the interconnected contexts they explore to examine new ways of doing political theory, and to consider how a variety of political concepts—power and resistance, oppression, emancipation and intersectionality, personal and collective responsibility—illuminate the world, and our own lives, today.