Political Theorist & Historian

I am the Departmental Lecturer in Feminist Political Theory at the University of Oxford. Prior to coming to Oxford, I was a lecturer at the Otto Suhr Institute of Political Science at the Free University of Berlin. I have previously written on topics in Democratic Theory, Early Modern Political History, Queer-Feminist Theory, Affect Studies, and Non-Human Political Theory.

I am currently writing a history of the rise of fraternity and sodomy as co-constitutive symbols, practices, and feelings of equality in Early Modern England. The book investigates how the English Revolution of 1688 gave rise to novel ideas and practices of gender and sexuality and shows how fears concerning sodomy and gender-nonconformity shaped modern understandings of equal male citizenship and democracy in Britain.

My work has appeared in Political Science & Politics, Contemporary Political Theory, Modern Intellectual History, Contemporary Political Theory, Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry, among others.

My research has been supported by The John Fell Fund, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, The Nicholson Center for British Studies, and The Pozen Family Center for Human Rights.

I am happy to collaborate with other academics, artists, and researchers.

• Grooming Authoritarianism: Anti-Trans/Queer Panic as Pedagogy for Democratic Decline co-written with Sam Galloway — PS: Political Science and Politics, Volume 58, Issue 3, July 2025, pp. 1-5

  We address the anti-trans and queer panic integral to the ascendance of authoritarian politics in the United States and argue that these moral panics function as pedagogical tools that cultivate authoritarian dispositions under the guise of child protection and moral order. In response, we call on all political scientists to "queer" political science by undoing the cisheteronormative assumptions that structure the discipline's epistemology, research agendas, and normative imaginaries. This is not the special obligation of LGBTQ scholars alone but all political scientists. Following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's orientation away from a "minoritizing" toward a "universalizing" epistemological perspective, we contend that queering political science opens the field to analyses that grasp how gender and sexuality are central to the reproduction of authoritarianism, and thus indispensable to any analytical and political efforts to resist democratic decline. Read full text →

• From the Body of the King to the Body of the Nation: Sovereignty, Sodomy, & the English Revolution of 1688 Modern Intellectual History 21, 3 (2024): 524-550.

  This article explores how rumors of monarchical sodomy at the turn of the eighteenth century became entangled with newly emerging conceptions of the nation and nationalized space. After the 1688 Revolution in England, accusations of the king's sodomy increasingly mobilize territorial rather than theological understandings of sodomy's danger, transforming sodomy's terror from a satanic threat to the Christian kingdom to a national threat to the English nation. While historical studies on the territorialization of sovereignty often focus on structural transformations to the state, these accounts rarely attend to transformations in political feeling. This article shows how a novel discourse of national sodomy helped unsettle long-standing attachments to the king as the embodiment of sovereign power. Moreover, this article methodologically innovates the study of state sovereignty by attending to conceptual problems of political attachment through the study of an affectively loaded concept such as sodomy. Read full text →

• Gender, Sexuality, and the Problem of Democratic Erosion: Using History to Conceptualize the Present Crisis Femina Politica: Zeitschrift für Feministische Politikwissenschaft, 33, 1 (2024): 72-80.

  This article critically surveys how the scholarly literature on democratic decline has theorised the relationship between gender, sexuality, and democracy. I show the limitations of the current view of gender ideology as a "symbolic glue" of the far right and propose an alternative conception that centres the materiality of the body. Whereas studies on democratic erosion commonly take the crises of democracy in the 20th and 21st century as their point of analysis, I turn to the early rise of democracy in early modern Europe as a point of comparison. By highlighting the place of gender and sexuality in democracy's historical consolidation, I hope to illuminate the constitutive role of gender and sexuality in democracy's current deconsolidation and show why the crisis of democracy has meant a crisis in the gender order. Read full text →

• The Inter-est Between Us: Ontology, Epistemology, and the Failure of Political Representation Contemporary Political Theory, 22, 1 (2022): 46-69.

  In recent decades, theories of representation have undergone a constructivist turn, as many theorists no longer view the represented subject as prior to but rather as an effect of representation. Many democratic theorists have sought to reconceptualize representation and its democratic possibilities by turning away from ontological questions altogether. By focusing instead on how representatives come to know the public interest, theorists now contend that an epistemological account best explains how political representation can foster democratic participation. Yet, theorists of representation have not assessed whether this turn to epistemology has overcome the ontological problems that initially motivated it.

  This article tracks epistemological defenses of representation to outline two models of political representation that attempt to tackle the epistemological problem of constituent interest without turning to ontological questions of foundations. I argue that both theoretical tendencies ultimately remain caught in the problems of foundations and undercut their normative aspirations to defend a properly democratic vision of political participation. Turning to Hannah Arendt's comments on public interest and her writings on council democracy, the article retheorizes the concept of political representation to avoid the ontological problems that beset current accounts. Read full text →

• Communist Guilt, Public Happiness, and the Feelings of Collective Attachment The Double Binds of Neoliberalism: Theory and Culture After 1968, eds. Guillaume Collett, Krista Giappone, Iain MacKenzie, (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022), 201-224.

  Uprisings in the 21st century rarely display classical political strategies of recruiting militants into political parties. According to Jodi Dean's recent work Crowds and Party, such leaderless revolts cannot meet the challenge of sustaining the upswell of collective energies beyond the event of rebellion. Against a politics she identifies with May '68, Dean proposes a novel defense of the party as an affective infrastructure capable of regenerating the feelings of collective unity experienced in the rebellious crowd.

  Taking up the challenge to reconsider the party, this chapter argues that central to Dean's vision of the party is what I call an affective politics of communist guilt, which ultimately fails to rekindle the kinds of co-operative relations necessary for political struggle. Drawing on Hannah Arendt's concept of public happiness, I argue that the experience of political joy provides a more salutary framework for understanding how crowd participants feel themselves as a collectivity in the event of revolt. Accordingly, this chapter analyzes the crowd from the perspective of its non-sovereign participants and contends that the promise of collective attachment is better secured not through communist guilt but rather riotous happiness. Read full text →

• Sovereign Chaos and Riotous Affects, Or, How to Find Joy Behind the Barricades. Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry, 2, 1–2 (2020): 152–172

  A commonly deployed signifier to render the political event of a riot intelligible, 'chaos' describes an affective condition of disorder and disarray. Recounting the 2018 May Day / May 1st protests in Paris, which both politicians and media declared to be a riot, the paper argues that to consider the riot as chaos is to think and feel like a state.

  Critically interrogating the analytical purchase of 'chaos' to describe a riotous assembly of bodies, the paper contends that 'chaos' is not only a theoretically impoverished concept to understand such political events, but also that sovereignty mobilizes 'chaos' as an affective infrastructure of governance to shore up attachment to the security state. Repudiating the sovereign logic of chaos, the paper presents a first-person encounter with a protest-declared-riot in order to explore the various affects that materialize around such events. In so doing, the paper develops an affective approach to theorize relations of political antagonism in the street, arguing that whereas the state weaponizes terror as a form of governance, the rioters weaponize joy as an affective means of resistance. Read full text →

• From Mute Objects to Militant Subjects: The Politics of Rebellious Animals Subjectivation in Political Theory and Contemporary Practices, eds. Andrei Siclodi and Andreas Oberprantacher, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 237–263.

  Russian translation: "ОТ БЕЗГЛАСНЫХ ОБЪЕКТОВ К ВОИНСТВУЮЩИМ СУБЪЕКТАМ: ПОЛИТИКА БУНТУЮЩИХ ЖИВОТНЫх1", in ФОНАРЬ ДИОГЕНА: Человек в многообразии практик [DIOGENES' LANTERN: The Human Being in Diversity of Practice], 3-4 (2018): 200-227.

  Dominant animal rights discourse fails to analyze the boundary of the political community as marked by a historical division between logical animals (humans) and phonic animals (nonhumans). In so doing, this discourse merely enables nonhumans to become mute objects of representation rather than subjects of speech, maintaining the exclusion of animals from the political community of speaking subjects. Eschewing moral approaches to the political problem of exclusion, the paper demonstrates that the work of radical democrats provides a political lens with which to approach nonhuman subjectivity and speech… Read full text →

• ‘We Support Circus Animals Who Kill Their Captors’: Nonhuman Resistance, Animal Subjectivity, and the Politics of Democracy Tiere - Texte - Transformationen: Kritische Perspektiven der Human-Animal Studies, ed. Andreas Oberprantacher, Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015, pp. 277–294.

  Greek translation: Υποστηρίζουμε τα ζώα που σκοτώνουν τους καταπιεστές τους: πολιτική των εξεγερμένων ζώων trans., Kostas Alexiou (Athens: Kynaigei, 2017).

  Animal rights activists and advocates attempt to include nonhuman animals in the human community through reasoned philosophical tracts and by direct action. However, dominant animal rights discourse fails to analyze the boundary of the political community as marked by a historical division between logical animals (humans) and phonic animals (nonhumans). In so doing, this discourse merely enables nonhumans to become mute political objects of representation rather than subjects of speech, and thus maintains the exclusion of animals from the political community of speaking subjects.

  By turning to the work of radical democrats, I argue for a re-conceptualization of animal subjectivity and speech that promises a new framework for attending to the needs and standpoints of nonhuman animals. Exploring three episodes of nonhuman resistance, I argue that a radical democratic framework illuminates how nonhuman animals actively oppose their exclusion from the political community, thus transforming nonhumans from objects of political deliberation into subjects of politics. Read full text →

• Feminism and the Future Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford — 2025–27
• Michel Foucault and his Histories of Sexuality Otto Suhr Institute of Political Science, Freie Universität Berlin — Proseminar 15433 — Summer 2024

  Michel Foucault is arguably one of the most significant thinkers of the twentieth century and his work continues to exercise extraordinary influence across the humanities and social sciences. First published in 1976, the first volume of The History of Sexuality fundamentally changed how we approach questions of political power, history, sexuality, truth, the subject, and resistance, to name just a few topics. Thirty-four years after his death in 1984, the fourth and final volume of Foucault’s historical study of sexuality was published in French in 2018 and translated into English in 2021. To mark this event and seeming closure of Foucault’s investigations on sexuality, this seminar focuses on a critical close reading of Foucault’s four volume study of the history of sexuality: The Will to Knowledge (vol. 1); The Use of Pleasure (vol. 2); The Care of the Self (vol. 3); Confessions of the Flesh (vol. 4). In this seminar, we will examine the historical emergence of this thing we call ‘sexuality’ as narrated across Foucault’s works. We will explore why Foucault considered the history of sexuality to be a privileged example through which to elaborate a new conception of power, history of the state, ethics of the self, and new possibilities of theorizing resistance to contemporary forms of domination.

• Political Anatomies of the Body-Politic Freie Universität Berlin — Proseminar 15053 — Summer 2022

  Since the Renaissance, the idea of the "body politic" was used to describe European political communities, but the body politic was not simply a metaphor to speak about the state. It was also a way that monarchs would make sense of and exercise political power. With the democratic revolutions of the 18th century, political power is no longer said to cohere in the single body of the king but in the symbolic category of "The People." What exactly happened to the body of political power? Do the democratic people have a body? And more broadly, in what ways do bodies, both metaphorically and in their lived flesh, inform how we make sense of and practice politics today? In this seminar, students will be introduced to historical and contemporary debates on the politics of the body and the body politic in modern democracy. Students will investigate the relationship between this material substance we call the body and the metaphor of the body in the history of western political thought. We will explore how the place of the body in modernity intersects with and is made possible by categories of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Seminar readings will cover historical, radical democratic, feminist, and queer theories that seek to make sense of the political role of bodies in modern liberal democratic society.

• Advanced Theories of Gender & Sexuality University of Chicago, with Prof. Linda Zerilli — GNSE 31400 — Winter 2021

  Beginning with the "new social movements" such as feminism and gay liberation, this seminar explores key debates around which gender and sexuality were articulated as tenacious but open structures of power subject to political critique and social transformation. The relatively stable yet dynamic character of "the sex/gender system" raises basic questions of structure and event: (1) how are systemic relations of domination and rule historically constituted and sustained over time?; and (2) how can that which is regularly reproduced be fundamentally altered through both quotidian and extraordinary forms of action? Ongoing heteropatriarchal structures have challenged theorists and activists to forge new frameworks of critique. These frameworks will be examined with an eye to how racialized sexuality and gender are created and contested in the context of modern biopolitical capitalism.

• Power, Identity, Resistance I University of Chicago — SOSC 11400 — Autumn 2019

  This seminar is the first quarter of a three-quarter sequence in the social sciences. It examines the ways in which power both constitutes and is constituted by economics, politics and culture in the modern era. We look at the different modes by which power is exercised as well as at various means of resisting domination. We also look at the ways in which economic, political and cultural forces interact to shape our identities. Through exposure to canonical texts, this seminar will provide you with tools for thinking through social problems and will enhance your argumentative skills. More broadly, it will help you develop your capacity for critical reasoning and writing.

• Gender and Sexuality in World Civilizations University of Chicago, with Prof. Linda Zerilli — GNSE 15003 — Winter 2019

  Gender and sexuality are fundamental categories of human existence, as well as key analytical, political, and cultural categories that shape everyday life. Just as important as the ubiquity and salience of these categories is their mutability: their social, political, and ideological valence varies widely according to geographical context and across historical periods. Philosophers, poets, novelists, painters, and composers, as well as scholars from a wide range of disciplines, have addressed these issues, and a substantial corpus of works speak to key themes such as love, sex, citizenship, family, law, violence, religion, culture, creativity, migration, and politics through the lens of gender and sexuality. In this course our objective will be to engage closely with a carefully chosen set of texts, films, and visual objects, in order to open these up to analysis and discussion.

• Teaching Assistant University of Chicago — Power, Identity, and Resistance II (Paul Staniland), Introduction to Political Theory (Matthew Landauer), Power, Identity, and Resistance I (Aaron Benanav) — Autumn 2017 – Winter 2018

Send a message using the form below.