A political theorist, Tom Donahue-Ochoa studies ideas like “liberties” and “injustices” through trans-local lenses. That means he asks such questions as, “What can we learn by looking at alike ideas in unlike places? Or by tracking a concept as it moves from one place to another? How does that movement change both the concept and those places?”

Donahue-Ochoa is the author of Unfreedom for All: How the World’s Injustices Harm You (Oxford UP, 2019). He has also published articles in Journal of Social and Political Philosophy, Review of Politics, European Journal of Political Theory and Ethics & the Environment, among others. He has been a principal investigator or co-principal investigator on research grants from the American Political Science Association and the American Philosophical Association.

Before joining UVA, he served as an assistant professor of political science at Haverford College; a lecturer in Yale University’s Program in Ethics, Politics & Economics; and a postdoctoral research fellow in philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City.

This year, Tom will be writing a paper in transregional thought. Its working title is, “Democratizing Ideas: Creolizing, Fieldwork, and the Politics of Upending Categories.” He will also be teaching “The Earth: Ethics, Politics & Economics” for the Politics Department and “They Think WHAT? Visions of Politics” in the Engagements.