Below is an alphabetized list of the doctoral students I am advising or have recently advised at the University of Chicago.

Alex Haskins (PhD 2020) is Assistant Professor of Politics and International Relations at Wheaton College. His research interests include the history of political thought (East Asian, European, and American), comparative political theory, and intellectual history with a focus on questions concerning sovereignty, empire, religion & politics, and international law.

Sarah Johnson (PhD 2015) is a senior lecturer in the Law, Letters, and Society program at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on the relationship between political thought and the historical imagination; she is currently completing a book manuscript, “The Ages We Live By,” that examines how practices of historical periodization shape efforts to analyze and reimagine social . From 2015 to 2017 Sarah was a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst College. 

Emma Mackinnon is University Lecturer in History at the University of Cambridge. Her teaching and research is in contemporary political theory and the history of political thought, with broader research interests in histories of human rights and humanitarianism, anticolonialism, international political thought, and the relationship between history and politics. Her current book project concerns the legacies of the eighteenth-century French and American rights declarations in mid-twentieth century politics of race and empire. 

Tejas Parasher (PhD 2019) is a Junior Research Fellow in History and Politics at King’s College, University of Cambridge. His research interests include the history of modern political and legal thought; 20th century South Asian political and intellectual history; historiography; Third Worldism and anti-colonialism; and postcolonial studies.

Lucas Pinheiro (PhD 2019) is a Political Economy Fellow at Dartmouth College. He will join Bard College as Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Studies in August 2022. His research bridges political theory and social history by focusing on the development of global capitalism, empire, and the legacies of racial slavery in the Atlantic world since the late seventeenth century. His current book manuscript is titled “Factories of Modernity: Political Thought in the Capitalist Epoch.”

Aditi Rajeev Shirodkar (PhD 2021) has research interests in religion and politics, comparative colonialism, post-colonial politics, and comparative political theory. Aditi’s dissertation examined the politics of conversion through an analysis of the processes of Catholic conversion in early modern Portuguese Goa, with a focus on the relationship between violent colonial conversion programs, indigenous uptake of religion, and new political visions that emerge through the process of conversion.

Nazmul S. Sultan (PhD 2020) is a Junior Research Fellow in Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge.His current book project explores the question of popular sovereignty in modern Indian political thought and offers a new interpretation of the anticolonial democratic project. His research interests include empire and colonialism, popular sovereignty, democratic theory, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century political thought.

Larry Svabek is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Chicago. His research is situated in the history of political thought with specializations in African-American and American political thought, the politics of inequality, slavery and its afterlife, and American political development. In his dissertation, Larry tracks the abolitionist appropriation of agrarian republican thought and shows how recovering nineteenth century land politics can aid twenty-first century efforts to contest racial domination and hierarchy.

Sarita Zaffini (PhD 2018) is a post-doctoral fellow at University of Chicago. The broad scope of Sarita’s research is political theology: the study of religious beliefs and their political consequences. She is especially interested in the coincidence of political and religious conflict, and the doctrinal shifts that can lead a religion to abandon one political perspective for another.