I am currently working on Frederick Douglass’s and Ida B. Wells’s appeals to conscience, building on some of my archival work on Douglass this past summer. Looking ahead to the spring, I will be traveling to Chicago and New York to conduct research for my second book at the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center at University of Chicago and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. I am grateful to have received generous funding from the Bauer Leadership Center to support this archival research on my second book project.
I recently published an essay on Ida B. Wells’s view of political resistance in TIME, bringing her theory and practice of political resistance into conversation with recent debates on the celebration of Black History Month.
This semester, I am teaching the “Introduction to Political Theory” lecture course at Washington University in St. Louis. We are engaging with three core concepts in the discipline of political theory - justice, freedom, and democracy. Please see the syllabus here, as well as a visual representation of some of the authors that we are engaging with in this course.
Here’s a digital whiteboard of our review session from our justice unit on Sophocles’s Antigone, King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” and Rawls’s Theory of Justice.
Here’s a digital whiteboard of our review session from our freedom unit on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Second Discourse, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, and W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America.
This past year, I completed a research fellowship at the Beinecke Rare Books & Manuscript Library at Yale University. It was incredible to engage with their materials on Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Ida B. Wells, and see many of my colleagues back at Yale.
My author-meets-critics book panel at APSA 2024 was incredible. Many thanks to the participants, Yuna Blajer de la Garza, Julie Cooper, Joshua Cherniss, and Gianna Englert, for their generous intellectual engagement. I am looking forward to publishing this collection of responses to the book with Susan Collins at Review of Politics as a symposium.
