I’m a political theorist and Assistant Professor of Politics at Bard College. Before joining Bard, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Political Economy Project and Department of Government at Dartmouth College as well as a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago.

My research connects political theory to social and intellectual history and political economy by focusing on the development of global capitalism, empire, and slavery in the Atlantic world since the seventeenth century as well as the relationship between political thought and the advent of automated technologies in the long twentieth century. 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 across Britain and its Atlantic colonies between 1688 and 1807. From this historical study, I develop a conceptual framework for understanding modern capitalism and confronting its enduring patterns of racialization, discipline, and inequality at contemporary workplaces like Google and Amazon.

Parts of this research were the basis for two recent peer-reviewed journal articles: “Protocols of Production: The Absent Factories of Digital Capitalism,” which is forthcoming in the American Political Science Review; and “A Factory Afield: Capitalism and Empire in John Locke’s Political Economy,“ published by Modern Intellectual History in March 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 co-founded the History and Theory of Capitalism Workshop with colleagues in the Departments of Political Science and History at the University of Chicago.