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Past Political Theory Colloquium

2024-2025

Decentralization ≠ Democracy: The Organization of Power & the Future of Social Media

Jennifer Forestal

Assistant Professor, Loyola University of Chicago

Publics and Policing: Spies, Surveillance, and Colonial Subjects in Interwar Paris.

Nancy Luxon

Professor, University of Minnesota

Creative Paranoia and Radical Democracy: the politics of SNNC and SDS

George Shulman

Professor Emeritus, New York University

Foundational Territories: Trans-national Territories for Complex Resource System Management

Cara Nine

Associate Professor of Political Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Imperfect Victims: Feminism and the Problem of Legible Resistance

Menaka Phillips

Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Toronto Mississauga and University of Toronto

Writing Our Own Ends? Ethnographic Ethics for the Endangered

Layla Picard

PhD Candidate, University of Virginia Department of Politics

No Humans Involved: The Erasure of Earthwork in Historical and Contemporary Environmentalisms

David Temin

Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Michigan

Water as Mediator: Plural Ontologies of Land and Pragmatism in Territorial Rights

Paulina Ochoa Espejo

Nau III Professor of the History and Principles of Democracy, Department of Politics, University of Virginia

The Specter of Statelessness

Lucia Rafanelli

Assistant Professor, The George Washington University

Down with Grand Narratives! Humor, Sense, and Nonsense at the Gezi Protests

Nazli Konya

Assistant Professor, Colby College

2023-2024

The Place of Culture and Consciousness in the Modern World-System: A Critical Encounter Between Cedric Robinson and Immanuel Wallerstein

Jean-Marc Pruit

PhD. Student, University of Virginia

Du Bois's Theory of Epistemic Democracy

Kimberly Ann Harris

Assistant Professor, University of Virginia

Elizabeth Cohen

Professor of Political Science and Senior Research Associate, Campbell Public Affairs Institute, Syracuse University

Melvin Rogers

Associate Director of the Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, Professor of Political Science, Brown University

Toni Morrison and the Political Imagination: A Conversation with Joseph R. Winters II and Lawrie Balfour

Joseph R. Winters II and Lawrie Balfour

Duke University and University of Virginia

Kevin Elliott

Lecturer, Yale University

Alyssa Battistoni

Assistant Professor, Barnard College

Make Sovereignty Great Again: Power in the 21st Century

Elisabeth Anker

Professor, George Washington University

Paul Weithman

Glynn Family Honors Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame

The Right to Opacity

Nasrin Olla

University of Virginia

Aziz Rana

Professor and Provost’s Distinguished Fellow at Boston College Law School

2022-2023

Bucket on the Mountaintop: The Civil Rights Movement, Gandhian Nonviolence, and the Sociology of Caste

Kai Parker

Assistant Professor, University of Virginia

David Hume on Slavery

Danielle Charette

Post-Doctoral Fellow

How to Kill a Mortal God: Hobbes on the Theory and Practice of Rebellion

Vijay Phulwani

Visiting Professor, University of Virginia

Erin Pineda

Professor, Smith College

Jess Flanigan

University of Richmond

Camila Vergara

University of Cambridge

James Lindley Wilson

University of Chicago

Lucas Pinheiro

Bard College

Amanuel Gebremichael

PhD Candidate, University of Virginia

2021-2022

Deva Woodly

Associate Professor, The New School for Social Research

Matt Frierdich

Graduate Student, University of Virginia

Jared Loggins

Post Doc, Amherst College

The Figure of the King: Ernst Kantorowicz as a Response to Max Weber

Issac Reed

Professor of Sociology, UVa

Punishment and the Revocation of Citizenship

Hana Nasser

Graduate Student, University of Virginia

Representing Humanity: the Role of Museums in Addressing Colonial Alienation

Catherine Lu

Professor, McGill University

World-building on or with the Land? Learning Anticolonial critique from Beavers and their Blockades

Andrew Dilts & Sarah Tyson

Loyola Marymount University, UC Denver

Responding to Riots: A Grounded Normativity Analysis of Recent UK Riot Discourse

Jonathan Havercroft

Associate Professor, University of Southampton

Sid Issar

Post Doc, University of Virginia

Chiara Cordelli

Associate Professor, University of Chicago

Jennifer Rubenstein

Associate Professor, University of Virginia

2020-2021

Subversive Pedagogies: Radical Possibility in the Academy.

Claire Timperley

Lecturer, Victoria University of Wellington

Angela Y. Davis: Abolitionism, Democracy, Freedom

Neil Roberts

Chair and Professor of Africana Studies, Williams College

Never Could Learn to Drink that Blood and Call it Wine: Bob Dylan as Prophet of the Postsecular

Jeffrey Green

Professor and Director of Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy, University of Pennsylvania

Agonism, Democracy and the Moral Equality of Voice

Stephen White

Professor Emeritus, University of Virginia

Revelations of the Impossible

Naveed Mansoori

Post-Doctoral Research Associate, University of Virginia

Why Deliberation? Hint: It's About Democracy

Molly Scudder

Assistant Professor, Purdue University

The Democratic Ambivalence of Invisible Citizens

Daniel Henry

PhD Candidate, University of Virginia

2018-2019

Rethinking Critique as a Political Practice of Freedom with Arendt and Foucault

Linda Zerilli

Professor, University of Chicago

Idle No More and the Settler-Colonial State

Andrew Gates

PhD Candidate, University of Virginia

Toni Morrison and the Liberatory Work of Words

Lawrie Balfour

Professor, University of Virginia

Disruptive Sounds of the Present-Past: "The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man"

Daniel Henry

PhD. Candidate, University of Virginia

Of Refuge and Reverie

Sharon Sliwinski

University of Western Ontario

Conceiving Medicalized Citizenship: Abortion Politics and Gendered Political Belonging

Claire McKinney

Assistant Professor, College William & Mary

What Is Spontaneous Order?

Dan Luban

Junior Research Fellow, University College, Oxford

Propaganda, Beauty, and the Moral Psychology of White Supremacy: On the Political Aesthetics of W.E.B. Du Bois

Robert Gooding Williams

Professor, Columbia University

2017-2018

Beyond Birmingham: King, Disobedience, and the Powers of Non-Violence

Alexander Livingston

Assistant Professor, Cornell University

Thinking without History: Gandhi on Patience

Uday Mehta

Distinguished Professor of Political Science, The Graduate Center, CUNY

White World Order, Black Power Politics: Race in the Making of American International Relations

Robert Vitalis

University of Pennsylvania

What's the Problem with Geo-engineering?

Ross Mittiga

PhD Candidate, University of Virginia

Seeing through Lies: Plato’s Republic on How to Avert Tyranny

Jill Frank

Cornell University