My research explores why we are failing to navigate emerging security crises and how conceptual engineering in political theory might help us adapt to such conditions more effectively. More generally, my interests include contemporary political theory; philosophical anthropology; political geography; existential risk (via apocalypse studies); intelligence history and military psychogeography; and film and literary criticism. In addition to my research program, I write sporadically on topics that interest me (conceptual engineering, risk, weird media) at Gray Sky Thinking and direct Strangeways Idea Lab, an independent research group focused on exploring strange new ways of thinking about technics and technology.
My first book, Noir Materialism: Freedom and Obligation in Political Ecology, is available now from Bloomsbury Publishing (recently reviewed in Theory & Event 29:1). It reworks the relationship between nature and politics, developing a philosophy of nature that reformulates freedom, obligation, and the subject in response to an ecological crisis that is, at root, political and conceptual.
My second book, Theory of the Alien: Astropolitics, Spacepower, and the Outside, is forthcoming from Routledge in 2026. The book characterizes outer space as a fundamentally political and territorial domain and develops a philosophical anthropology adequate to Space Age conditions, arguing that our political, spatial, and strategic imagination is underwritten by categories of the exogenous – what is taken to lie “outside” the traditionally political – which the opening of space as an economic and military frontier forces into view. The argument moves through the politics of the space community and the United States Space Force, the future of territory and war, the conceptual history of the extraterrestrial hypothesis, and political theory at a planetary scale. Related material will also be appearing soon as a chapter in an edited volume from Stanford University Press, and complementary work already has appeared in Vault of Culture and Limina.
I am working on my next book, The Esoteric State: Military-Industrial Imaginaries and the Politics of Secret Worldbuilding. The book examines some of the strangest and most disavowed undertakings of the national security state – psychic research, human experimentation, psychological warfare, and related projects – as privileged sites for understanding how modern power operates. On my view, these are not marginal curiosities but revealing exceptions through which the deeper logics and norms of state power come into question. It engages at length with Jean Baudrillard (whose work is uncannily suited for maneuvering through our contemporary predicament, in which power increasingly operates by destabilizing reality itself), William S. Burroughs (read as political theory), Nelson Goodman (on worldmaking), and the contemporary artists Trevor Paglen and Suzanne Treister.