Links to my published work, and downloadable copies where available, can be found at my academia.edu page.
Here a conversation about my work on Frantz Fanon and the politics of exhaustion on Ordinary Unhappiness, a podcast of psychoanalysis and politics.
Positions and Education
2022-2027 Visiting Assistant Professor in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought
Amherst College
2021-2022 Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Critical Theory
Justitia Center for Advanced Studies, Goethe-Universität of Frankfurt am Main, Germany
2015-2021 Ph.D Political Science, M.A., M.Phil.
Yale University
2010-2014 B.A. magna cum laude in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought
Amherst College
Books
Politics and Exhaustion: the Phenomenology of Action and the Horizons of Critique. Book manuscript. Under review.
Peer-Reviewed Writing
“Frantz Fanon and The Revolutionary Group.” Group Analysis. 2026.
“Desiring Politics: Herbert Marcuse, Black Radicalism, and the Political Economies of Exhaustion.” New German Critique. 2025.
“Fanon’s Clinic: Revolutionary Therapeutics and the Politics of Exhaustion.” Polity. 2023.
Another Universalism: The Critical Theory of Seyla Benhabib (eds. Anna Jurkevics, Stefan Eich, Nishin Nathwani,
and Nica Siegel). Columbia University Press New Directions in Critical Theory series, 2023.
“The Roots of Crisis: Interrupting Arendt’s Radical Critique.” Theoria: a Journal of Social and Political Theory. 2015.
“Thinking the Boundaries of Customary Law in South Africa” South African Journal on Human Rights. 2015.
Sarat et all. “Scenes of Execution: Spectatorship, Political Responsibility, and State Killing in American Film.”
Law & Social Inquiry. 2013. Re-printed in Punishment in Popular Culture, NYU Press, 2015
“Race and Bureaucracy, Reconsidered.” The Origins of Totalitarianism for Cambridge University Press Philosophical Anniversaries series. 2026. Invited and in process.
Public writing, reviews, creative & mixed media
“Politics, Feminism and Psychoanalysis: An Interview with Dr. Nica Siegel” with University of Connecticut Graduate Students. Forthcoming 2026.
“Freud, Private Property, and Family Life.” Parapraxis magazine. Forthcoming 2026.
Book Review of Contesting the Far Right: a Psychoanalytic and Feminist Theory Approach by Claudia Leeb. Perspectives on Politics. 2024.
Book Review of Frantz Fanon: Combat Breathing by Nigel C. Gibson. Parapraxis Magazine. 2024.
“Fanon.” Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy. (eds. Mortimer Sellers and Stephen Kirste), 2023.
“The Destiny To Be Set Free.” Parapraxis Magazine, 2023
Book Review of Bonnie Honig, Public Things. PhiloSOPHIA: a Journal of TransContinental Feminism. 2021.
“The South African National Development Plan and African Commission Jurisprudence.” Legal Resources Centre Working Paper Series. A2/2013. 2013.
Selected Working Projects
“The Universalizing Tendency: Criminality, Contracts, and Colonial Madness in Fanon’s Clinical Writings”
“The Jurisprudence of Neglect: Apartheid, Neoliberalism, Race.” Working paper supported by the Mayibuye Archives at the University of the Western Cape.
Academic Honors, Fellowships, and Awards
2022-2024 Mellon seminar “Disinformation”, Faculty affiliate ($3000+)
2021-2022 Postdoctoral Fellowship, Justitia Center for Advanced Studies, Goethe-Universität of Frankfurt am Main, Germany
2020-2021 Ardon L. Judd (B.A. 1877, LL.B. 1879) Scholarship Fund 2020-20201
2020 Yale University Associates in Teaching Fellowship, Spring 2020
2019-2021 Amherst College Memorial Fellowship for the Study of Political Science ($8,000)
2017-2019 Yale University James M. Cox Fellow
2018 Frankfurt School Summer School participant, “Ideology Critique”.
2018 Amherst College Alumni Graduate Fellowship
2017; 2015 Scholarship for Participation, Kent Summer School in Critical Theory
2016 MacMillan Pre-Dissertation Fellowship for Fieldwork in South Africa
2015-2021 Yale GSAS Doctoral Fellowship
2014 Amherst College Post-Baccalaureate Summer Research Fellow
2014 Robert Cover Prize Winner in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought for A Form of Thinking Called Arendt, senior thesis magna cum laude
Presentations and Lectures
2026 Fanon’s Confessions. WPSA.
2026 “Etiology and Revolution.” Cornell Department of Government Workshop.
2025 “The Universalizing Tendency: Frantz Fanon’s ‘Conducts of Confession’. APSA
2025 “The Communists Believe: a Roundtable on Freud and Property.” Psychosocial Foundation.
2025 “Grief and Exhaustion in a World on Fire.” Red May.
2025 “Etiology and Revolution.” Invited panelist at UC Berkeley Conference on Freud 2025
2025 “Politics and Exhaustion.” Two-part invited lecture at Wesleyan Center for the Humanities Speaker Series
2024 “Wilderson in South Africa.” Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. Invited talk.
2023 “Desiring Politics” APSA panel on Critical Theory
2023 “Wilderson in South Africa” Brown University Colloquium on Political Theory. Invited Talk
2023 “Desert Conditions: Arendt’s Metabolic Politics and the Frustrations of Action and Ecology” APT
2023 “Fanon.” Invited Seminar for Psychosocial Foundation, open to the public. Article accompanying.
2023 “Laboring the New: Metabolic Theories of Exhaustion and the Ecosocialist Genealogy of Arendt’s “Frustrations of Action” Conference in Canadian Political Thought
2022 “Wilderson in South Africa: Pessimism, Democracy, Ontology.” American Political Theory Annual Meeting. Paper Presentation.
2022 Discussant. Decoloniality Panel. American Political Theory Annual Meeting
2022 Abortion Politics and the Law (Amherst College CHI Fireside Chat)
2022 “Angela Davis and Furman v. Georgia: Two Abolitionist Imaginaries.” Furman at 50 Conference. Amherst College
2022 “Desiring Politics at the End of History.” APSA. Paper Presentation
2022 Discussant. Annual Hannah Arendt Conference at Leiden University
2022 “Fanon’s Clinic.” Kolloquium (Forst). Normative Orders, Goethe-Universität of Frankfurt am Main.
2021 Paper Presentation. “Fanon’s Clinic.” Panel on “Fanon Today.” American Political Science Association.
2021 Invited Talk. “Specters of Exhaustion: Marcuse, Marx, and Bell.” What Comes After the End of Ideology: a Conference on Daniel Bell at the University of Brussels. CANCELLED DUE TO COVID-19
2021 Paper Presentation. “Wilderson in South Africa”. UCLA Graduate Conference in Political Theory
2021 Discussant. “Afterlives of the Universal” panel held with Amherst College, Kent University Law School, and the working group for Law & the Animal via Zoom.
2020 Respondent to Bonnie Honig. “FABULATION and the Right to the City.” "Power, Violence, and Vulnerability" Colloquium for the Department of Classics at Yale University.
2020 Paper Presentation. “Fanon’s Engine: The Politics of Exhaustion.” APSA 2020 Panel, “Ugly Feelings Reconsidered: The Politics of Envy, Ugly Freedoms, Exhaustion, and Paranoia"
2020 Discussant. “Democracy, Liberalism, and Destabilization.” APSA
2020 Discussant for Amia Srinivasan, “Sex as Pedagogical Failure.” Yale Political Theory Workshop.
2020 Paper Presentation. “Fanon’s Engine: The Politics of Exhaustion.” WPSA 2020 Panel, "Fanon: Critiques and Contexts.” CANCELLED DUE TO COVID-19
2020 Paper Presentation. “Enduring Judgment: Arendt, Kafka, Kant.” Association for Law, Culture, and the ]Humanities.
2020 Paper presentation. “Fanon’s Engine: Dialectics, Exhaustion, and the Origins of Afro-Pessimism.” Afterlives of the Universal, held as Amherst College. CANCELLED DUE TO COVID-19
2019 Paper Presentation. “Dimensions of Exhaustion” [accepted but unable to attend]. APSA 2019. 2019 Paper Presentation. “Dimensions of Exhaustion” [accepted but unable to attend]. “Crossroads of Critique: Axel Honneth and the Frankfurt School Project” Conference at Sciences Po.
2019 Paper Presentation. “Sacrifice Politics.” WPSA Spring 2019 Panel, “Attachment Without Obedience”
2019 Participant. Doris Lessing as Political Theorist Roundtable at New England Political Science Association Conference 2019
2018 Discussant for Julie Livingston, “Self-Devouring Growth: a Parable.” Agrarian Studies Colloquium, Yale University, Fall 2018
2018 Paper Presentation. “Dimensions of Exhaustion: Repressive Desublimation and Resistance.” Critical Theory Roundtable, Amherst College, Fall 2018
2018 Paper Presentation. “Exhausted Desire: Desublimation and the Specter of Depoliticization.” Exhausted Bodies, Exhausted Worlds: Department of English at University of Chicago.
2018 Paper Presentation. “Legal Thresholds of Exhaustion.” Law, Culture, and the Humanities Annual Meeting, Spring 2018.
2018 Paper Presentation. “The Jurisprudence of Neglect: Apartheid-era Land Reform and the Deregulation of Race.” Law, Culture, and the Humanities Annual Meeting.
2018 Paper Presentation. “Fanon’s Engine: The Dialectics of Exhaustion.” WPSA Spring 2018 Panel “What’s the Word?: Staking out Political Concepts”
2018 Discussant for Robyn Marasco “There’s a Fascist in the Family: Critical Theory and Anti- Authoritarianism.” Yale University Political Theory Workshop.
2017 Guest Lecture. “Arendt’s ‘Ideology and Terror’: Resistance, Thought, and the Foreclosure of Negative Liberty.” Introduction to Political Philosophy class, Yale, Fall 2017.
2017 Discussant for Ayten Gündoğdu, “The Nonhuman Condition: Arendt and the Phenomenology of Living Things.” Yale University Political Theory Workshop, Fall 2017.
2017 “Fanon’s Engine: The Dialectics of Exhaustion. “Reading Exhaustion” Brown University German Studies Graduate Conference, Fall 2017.
2017 “Dialectics and Exhaustion.” Yale University Second Year Conference for Graduate Students in Political Science.
2017 Discussant for Andrew Poe, “Logics of Possession.” Yale University Political Theory Workshop.
2017 “The Politics of Exhaustion Between Arendt and Ranciere.” New England Political Science Association
2017 “Law, Politics, and the Episteme of Exhaustion.” Association for Law, Culture, and the Humanities Annual Meeting.
2016 “Reading Hayek With the Post-Hegelians: Complexity, Market Sovereignty, and Cosmopolitan Law.” Panel on Law, Memory, and Cosmopolitanism at the New England Political Science Association Conference.
2016 “An Unfinished Work of Judgment; a Juridical Theory of Unfinishedness.” Panel on Arendt’s Materialism at NEPSA.
2016 “An Unfinished Work of Judgment; a Juridical Theory of Unfinishedness.” Panel on Theory, Interpretation, and Identity at the Association for Law, Culture, and the Humanities Annual Meeting.
2015 Discussant, “Arendt on Truth and Lies.” Yale University CHESS Workshop, September 2015
2013 Guest Lecture.“African Commission Jurisprudence as Critical Tool for Understanding the South African National Development Plan.” University of Cape Town law class, on behalf of the Legal Resources Centre.
References
Professor Seyla Benhabib Professor Paul North
Department of Political Science Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
Yale University Yale University
seyla.benhabib@yale.edu paul.a.north@yale.edu
Professor Karuna Mantena Professor Dr. Rainer Forst
Department of Political Science Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy
Columbia University Department of Political Science and Department of
km3510@columbia.edu Philosophy, Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt/Main
forst@em.uni-frankfurt.de
