research

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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 ecological crisis or political decay and (b) how conceptual engineering in political theory can help us adapt to such crises more effectively. I am especially engaged with questions about how contemporary and near-future crises affect our strategic imagination of what is politically desirable and possible.

Research interests include political theory, security studies, philosophical anthropology, ancient political philosophy, astropolitics, science and technology studies (STS), and the grand tradition of Western political thought. 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 ontological turn in anthropology, the political realism of Henry Kissinger, and various texts by Nietzsche, Plato, and Carl Schmitt.

My first book, Noir Materialism: Freedom and Obligation in Political Ecology, is forthcoming from Lexington Books (Rowman & Littlefield) in May, 2024.

I am working on a new book, tentatively titled Theory of the Alien: Astropolitics, Spacepower, and the Outside, which 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 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. I will be engaging extensively with the politics of the intelligence community, NASA, and the United States Space Force, as well as with ongoing puzzles related to the future of resource extraction and war, space law related to national security and space exploration, philosophical anthropology in the Space Age, and the extraterrestrial hypothesis.

As side projects, I am editing together All Things Shameful and Vile, an experimental art documentary about Plato’s political philosophy, as well as translating Fabián Ludueña Romandini’s monograph La comunidad de los espectros, I: Antropotecnia (Buenos Aires: Miño y Dávila, 2010), which is a substantive but overlooked contribution to the literature on biopolitics.