I think of political theory in terms of Hanna Fenichel Pitkin’s definition: it is “the attempt to define the interface between what must be accepted as necessary and what can be altered through active intervention.” Consequently, my research investigates questions related to (a) why we are failing to navigate emerging security crises (like the existential threat of climate change, democratic backsliding and political decay, and rapid cultural and technological transformations) and (b) and how conceptual engineering in political theory might help us mitigate or adapt to such circumstances more effectively. My first book, Noir Materialism: Freedom and Obligation in Political Ecology, is available from Bloomsbury Publishing. My second book is under contract with Routledge (see below).
Research interests include contemporary political theory, intellectual history, philosophical anthropology, Cold War studies, security studies, and film and literary criticism (with a special interest in the history of weird fiction). Other research projects include an intensive philosophical study of CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton and a Wittgensteinian reading of some political philosophical elements in One Thousand and One Nights (via Henry Corbin, René Girard, Robert Irwin, and Fatima Mernissi). In addition to my own research programs, I have directed both independent and sponsored research groups on a wide range of topics, e.g., Machiavelli’s political psychology, the political realism of Henry Kissinger, and political philosophy in Plato, Nietzsche, Leo Strauss, and Giorgio Agamben.
My second book – Theory of the Alien: Astropolitics, Spacepower, and the Outside – explores my burgeoning interest in astropolitics, or the so-called geopolitics of outer space, and the relatively recent emergence of outer space as an economic, political, and warfighting domain. There is currently very little political theory relating to this topic (despite, e.g., Hannah Arendt’s observation in 1958 that the Sputnik launch in 1957 was an event “second in importance to no other, not even to the splitting of the atom”). The book addresses fundamental questions about the future of politics on (and off) planet Earth, as well as delineates the ways in which our political and strategic imagination is deeply informed by categories and concepts of the exogenous, or what is considered to be “outside” the scope of the traditionally political. In the book, I engage extensively with the politics of the intelligence community, NASA, and the United States Space Force, as well as with ongoing theoretical puzzles related to the future of territory and war, space law related to national security and space exploration, and the cultural history of the extraterrestrial hypothesis. Fundamentally, however, the book is a work of philosophical anthropology, intended to provide a robust political theory of the human. My primary inspirations for this project are the German philosophical anthropologist Helmuth Plessner, Homer, and the diplomat and psychological warfare specialist Paul Linebarger (who maintained a secret life as a pulp science-fiction writer in the 1950s, writing as Cordwainer Smith), and my principle philosophical interlocutors are Carl Schmitt (on spatial order), Hannah Arendt (on earthliness), and Hans Blumenberg (on astronoetics, his term for the conceptual figuration of outer space in human culture and thought).