Before joining Bard, I was a Fellow in the Political Economy Project and Department of Government at Dartmouth College (2021-2022) and the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago (2019-2021).
My research spans the history of early modern political thought and contemporary political theory with a focus on economic life, race, aesthetics, and technology. My scholarship explores the historical and conceptual relationships between political ideas and their material contexts by situating intellectual and discursive formations within the intertwined development of capitalism and empire in the Atlantic world from the late seventeenth century to the present. My contributions to political theory emanate from a cross-disciplinary interpretive approach that draws on social and intellectual history to interweave political theory with economic, cultural, and scientific ideas and practices, pushing the boundaries of the field to establish new lines of inquiry—as much with regards to the questions we ask as with the sources and methodologies we use to answer them.
My current book manuscript, Factories of Modernity: Political Thought in the Capitalist Epoch, interprets the factory system as a decisive stage for political ideas and practices prior to and after the advent of mechanized industrial manufacturing in the nineteenth century. From this historical study of factories and the discursive practices in their orbits, I develop a conceptual framework for understanding historical capitalism and confronting its enduring patterns of racialization, discipline, and inequality across rural, colonial, artisanal, and commercial workplaces in the long eighteenth century and contemporary sites of digital production in the global internet economy.
Parts of this research were the basis for two recent peer-reviewed journal articles that represent the contemporary and historical tracks of my research, respectively: “Protocols of Production: The Absent Factories of Digital Capitalism,” published in the American Political Science Review (2025); and “A Factory Afield: Capitalism and Empire in John Locke’s Political Economy,“ published in Modern Intellectual History (2022).
With Paul Cheney, I organized a year-long research project, titled Intellectual Histories of Global Capitalism, supported by a Faculty Grant from the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago. The project brought together scholars from across the humanities and social sciences to explore how the early modern global economy might enrich our resources for understanding the hyper-capitalism of our present through new chronological and thematic approaches to the long-range history of capitalist societies, from Asia and Africa to Europe and the Americas.
My second book 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.
I am the recipient of the 2020 Stephen E. Bronner Dissertation Award, awarded by the Critical Political Science section of 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 founded the History and Theory of Capitalism Workshop with the support of colleagues in the Departments of Political Science and History at the University of Chicago.
I was born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil. One of my earliest political memories was learning about the radical politics of a professional soccer team, Corinthians, whose athletes launched a nation-wide social movement during the Brazilian dictatorship in the 1980s known as the “Democracia Corintiana [the adjective drops the ‘h’].” The movement’s leader, Sócrates (his actual name), was the most elegant, unathletic athlete to have ever graced a pitch. Besides being a smoker and heavy drinker, he was a medical doctor and a socialist who, upon arriving in Florence to play for Fiorentina in 1984, told a reporter that his plan while in Italy was “to read Gramsci in the original language and study the history of the Italian labor movement.” I have been a supporter of Corinthians ever since.
