I’m a political theorist and Political Economy Fellow in the Department of Government and Political Economy Project at Dartmouth College. I will join Bard College as Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Studies in August 2022. Before coming to Dartmouth I was a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Department of Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago. 

My research bridges political theory and social history by focusing on the development of global capitalism, empire, and the legacies of racial slavery in the Atlantic world since the late seventeenth century. My article, “A Factory Afield: Capitalism and Empire in John Locke’s Political Economy,” is forthcoming in Modern Intellectual History. In the spring of 2022, Paul Cheney and I will organize a workshop series at the Neubauer Collegium, titled Intellectual Histories of Global Capitalism. This project will bring together scholars from across the humanities and social sciences to explore how the early modern economy may enrich our understanding of the hyper-capitalism of our present.

I am the recipient of the 2020 Stephen E. Bronner Dissertation Award in New Political Science from the American Political Science Association and the 2021 Swogger Award for Exemplary Classroom Teaching. I hold a PhD and MA in Political Science from the University of Chicago, an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History from the University of Cambridge, and a BA (hons.) in Political Science with International Relations from the University of British Columbia. In 2017, I co-founded the History and Theory of Capitalism Workshop with colleagues in the Departments of Political Science and History at the University of Chicago.

My current book manuscript, Factories of Modernity: Political Thought in the Capitalist Epoch, recasts the factory system as a decisive stage for political thought and practice in the Atlantic world between 1688 and 1807. From this historical study, I develop a long-range conceptual framework for understanding modern capitalism and confronting its enduring patterns of racialization, poverty, and inequality. My second project, Badlands of Utopia: Empire’s Lost Futures of Work, will explore how early modern ideas of idleness and waste became part of a conceptual grammar of imperial expansion, economic improvement, and moral reform upon which an array of utopian thinkers and projectors relied to articulate novel visions of work in imagined societies to come. The project aims to recover the history of utopian thought and the attempts by British industrialists, Portuguese explorers, Swedish Abolitionists, and French reformers to create free labor colonies across Latin America and Africa over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

At Dartmouth, I will teach two advanced seminars in political theory and political economy during the winter of 2022: “Theories of Racial Capitalism” and “The Rise of Capitalism.” At the University of Chicago, I’ve taught in the Social Sciences Core sequences “Classics of Social and Political Thought” and “Power, Identity, and Resistance,” from 2016 to 2021. In the fall of 2019 I was a faculty fellow at the University of Chicago’s Center in Paris. As part of the UChicago Arts and Sciences Summer Program, I have co-taught interdisciplinary classes, with faculty in English and Anthropology, that reconsidered urbanization through social and political theory. In the Spring of 2016 I was invited to teach a graduate seminar at the New School for Social Research that connected the history of new media art with critical theories of capitalist society.

Thanks for visiting my website and feel free to get in touch if you have any questions!