For Winter Study 2021-2022, I will be teaching “The Lives of Infamous Men” at Williams College. Taking Michel Foucault’s eponymous essay as our point of departure, we will explore the violence done to life stories when they are made to conform to the neatness of the archive. With Foucault’s I, Pierre Rivière and Herculine Barbin serving as models, students will conduct original archival research on an individual of their own choice.

In fall 2020 and spring 2021, I taught “Modern Social Theory in Comparative Perspective” at New York University, Abu Dhabi. This course, which I developed, compares texts from the Western canon with works from feminist and postcolonial writers from across the globe. Students read Locke and Rousseau alongside Mary Wollstonecraft and C.L.R. James, Adam Smith and Marx alongside Lenin and Mao, and Gandhi alongside Frantz Fanon.

In summer 2017, I taught “Introduction to Political Theory” at the University of California, Los Angeles.  From Aristotle to Machiavelli, Hobbes to Rousseau, and Marx to Carl Schmitt, students explored the tradition of political theory.