Dr. Amy Gais

My work is animated by one of the central questions in political science: what does it mean to be free and what are the central impediments to freedom? My research agenda, more broadly, explores psychological barriers to freedom across various intellectual traditions, historical contexts, and regime types.

My two book projects, one published with Cambridge University Press (2024) and the second in progress, enlist an interdisciplinary approach to the psychological dynamics of political life. My current project, Freedom, Dissimulation, and Resistance in African American Political Thought, moves beyond questions on the efficacy and ethics of resistance to show that the act of dissimulating (i.e. modulating one’s political beliefs in certain contexts) has very real and meaningful psychological repercussions for the Black men and women combating racial injustice. This project follows on my first book, The Coerced Conscience (Cambridge University Press, 2024), which explores the social and psychological implications of dissimulation on religious dissenters in early modern Europe who were forced to equivocate their religion in order to survive repressive and persecutory conditions.

My current book project, Freedom, Dissimulation, and Resistance in African American Political Thought, builds on my work on the ways that dissenters navigated religious persecution in early modernity to consider how African American intellectuals and activists navigated political resistance in Jim Crow America. In the civil rights campaign, many Black intellectuals and activists were forced to modulate their critiques of racial oppression to make their resistance more palatable to white moderates and evade the very real threat of white supremacist violence. Commentators focus on the efficacy and ethics of dissimulation in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century African American political thought, but my project foregrounds the psychological repercussions of dissimulation as Black men and women navigate the impossible circumstances of Jim Crow. 

I show that influential Black figures, such as Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells, among several others, were not merely concerned with the effects of dissimulation on the advancement of the civil rights campaign or the ethics of it, but the intellectual and existential challenges of compromise. To what extent does dissimulation shield actors from additional oppression? Or should actors embrace more overt forms of resistance, even if it means risking death? Commentators often frame influential African American figures like Booker T. Washington and Ida B. Wells as falling on opposing sides of the well-worn framework between accommodation and radicalism. However, my project recovers a nuanced portrait of Black actors grappling with their radical vulnerability. This book project emerged from an undergraduate seminar I developed at WashU, “Freedom and Resistance in African American Political Thought,” which explores how Black actors theorize and practice resistance to racial oppression in American politics. I will be conducting archival research on Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois at the Beinecke Rare Books & Manuscript library in August 2024.

Thus far, I have finished an initial article in this project, “‘To Tell the Truth Freely’: Ida B. Wells on Sacrificial Death and Political Resistance,” under review at American Journal of Political Science.

Abstract: A courageous agitator, Ida B. Wells is known for her principled commitment to racial justice and reluctance to consider concessions in her anti-lynching advocacy. Yet this article argues that Wells negotiates her political principles, specifically her commitment to sacrificial death in political resistance, given the constraints she faces as a Black woman advocating for racial justice in Jim Crow America. Wells links Black leadership with sacrificial death, but she qualifies this view of political resistance when confronted with threats against her own life and the Black community in Memphis. By examining Wells’s theory of political resistance and Black leadership in her political pamphlets alongside her reflections on her anti-lynching advocacy in practice in her autobiography, this article reflects on how marginalized individuals manage competing political principles under oppressive conditions.