My research interest in race, racism, and racialization emerge from the background of trying to understand how contemporary U.S. elites use the politics of identity, directly and indirectly, in order to legitimate their dominion over domestic and international political and economic institutions. While at Hopkins, I have drawn from my undergraduate background in contemporary critical theory and my M.A. training in international politics and political economy to develop a better understanding of the centrality of racism to the reproduction of U.S. political institutions. Ultimately, I aim to continue working to develop my understanding of how we understand the world while emphasizing the relevance of a developed theoretical framework to actual political practice.

My dissertation reworks our conceptual grasp of "race" and the processes that produce it—racialization—in order to better ground our understanding of how actors use race concepts in actual political practice. In the first chapter, I draw out a practice-based account of identity formation from Michel Foucault, which allows me to undertake a close reading and critique of Charles Mills in the second. In the third, I address the social-science literature on racialization more generally, showing that it simultaneously fails to explain race while regularly identifying racialization with processes unrelated to race (typically prejudice or oppression on the basis of non-racial identities). Proposing a deflationary conception of racialization, I turn to the work of Stuart Hall and Adolph Reed, Jr., to intervene in contemporary debates around racial capitalism before concluding in a final chapter by arguing that only universalist policies can abolish racist domination.

Antiracist Politics: Historical Perspectives

This course theorizes the ends and tactics of antiracist politics by turning to historical debates among Black thinkers including W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Anna Julia Cooper, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and the Combahee River Collective (proposal accepted for January 2024 Intersession).

The Politics of Barbie

Special Opportunities for Undergraduate Learning course in contemporary political theory using the recent Greta Gerwig film to explore feminist, antiracist, and animal-liberation themes (October–December, Fall 2023).

Race and (Anti)Racism in Neoliberal America

Designed and taught through a Dean’s Teaching Fellowship, this course examine theories of race and racialization before turning to the practice of post-segregation Black politics in the U.S., finally ending with a discussion of contemporary antiracist issues (Spring 2023).

Forthcoming

With Samuel A. Chambers and Rothin Datta, “The Historical Trans-Historical,” in “These Ancients Remain Ever New”: Critical Antiquities after Marx, Edited by Tristan Bradshaw and Benjamin Brown (book proposal under peer review with Oxford University Press)

Published

“Glossary of Terms,” in Samuel A. Chambers, Capitalist Economics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 181–192

Articles in Reviewed Journals

“The Biopolitical Conditions of Sovereign Performativity,” Fast Capitalism, Vol. 15.1 (2018): 49–70

“‘Think You Right: I Am Not What I Am”: Dialectical Self-Overcoming and the Concept of Resilience,” SPECTRA, Vol. 6.2 (2018): 20–36

“Sovereignty in the City: The Tacticalization of 'Disallowed' Life,” SPECTRA, Vol. 6.1 (2017)

Works in Progress (revising for peer review)

“Beyond the Racial Contract,” an analysis and critique of the work of Charles Mills “Racialization without Races,” a rethinking of race and racialization