Northwestern University Graduate Student Political Theory Workshop

The Political Theory Colloquium is a faculty-organized speaker series. The colloquium is currently organized by Loubna El Amine and Shawn Dean.

Upcoming Colloquium Presentations

2022–23

• December 5:
  Molly Scudder (Political Science, Purdue University): “The Two Faces of Democracy: Decentering Agonism and Deliberation”
  Discussed by Tim Charlebois
• January 9:
  Desmond Jagmohan (Political Science, UC Berkeley): “Bound in Freedom: Martin Delany on Political Inequality and Social Injury”
• February 6 (via Zoom):
  Katrina Forrester (Government and Social Sciences, Harvard University): “Capitalism and the Organization of Displacement: Selma James’ Internationalism from Below”
  Discussed by Amanda Fu

• February 13:
  S M Amadae (Social Sciences, University of Helsinki): “Game Theory’s Missed Model of Systemic Discrimination:  Discussing the Wider Implications”
  Discussed by Megha Summer Pappachen
• March 6:
  Paulina Ochoa Espejo (Political Science, Haverford College): “Three Responses to Shifting Borders: Sovereigntism, Democratic Cosmopolitanism, and the Watershed Model”
  Discussed by Jinxue Chen
• April 24:
  Tae-Yeoun Keum (Political Science, UC Santa Barbara): “Voltaire’s Socrates and the Enlightenment Plato”
  Discussed by Charlotte Mencke
• May 22:
  David Temin (Political Science, University of Michigan): “The Struggle for Treaty: Ella Cara Deloria and Vine Deloria Jr. on Anticolonial Relations”
  Discussed by Lauren Baker

 

Past Colloquium Presentations

In 2021-22, the colloquium was organized by Jacqueline Stevens and Amanda Fu.

2021–22

• October 11:
  Inés Valdez (Political Science and Latino/a Studies, Ohio State University)
  “Labor, Nature, and Empire: Alienation and the Colonial Political Rift”
  Discussed by Usdin Martínez
• January 21:
  Jeremy Waldron (Law, New York University)
  “Locke and the Pragmatics of Legitimism”
  Discussed by Evgenia Mikriukova
• February 7:
  Glen Coulthard (Political Science and First Nations & Indigenous Studies, University of British Columbia)
  “Red Skin, White Masks: A Conversation with Glen Coulthard”
• February 15:
  Bonnie Honig (Political Science and Modern Culture & Media, Brown University)
  “Truth Queens: The Biblical Esther from Eve Sedgwick to Ivanka Trump”
  Discussed by Amanda Fu
• February 21:
  Erin Pineda (Government, Smith College)
  “An Entire World in Motion: Civil Disobedience as Decolonizing Praxis”

2019–20

• Joshua Simon (Political Science, Columbia University)
  “José Martí’s Immanent Critique of American Imperialism”
  Discussed by Arturo Chang
  Published in 2022 as “Overcoming the Other America: José Martí’s Immanent Critique of the Unionist Paradigm” in The Review of Politics 84 (1): 55–79.
• Onur Ulas Ince (Political Science, Singapore Management University)
  “Saving Capitalism from Empire: Uses of Global History in New Institutional Economics”
  Discussed by Audrey Nicolaïdes
• Alison E.J. McQueen (Political Science, Stanford University)
  “Absolving God’s Laws: Thomas Hobbes’s Scriptural Politics”
  Discussed by Andrew Day
• Daniel Kapust (Political Science, University of Wisconsin–Madison)
  “Machiavelli’s Discourses and the Tragedy of Empire”
  Discussed by Shawn Dean

2018–19

• Shatema Threadcraft (Government, Dartmouth College)
  “Critical Reflections on Spectacle: #BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName, and #MeToo”
• Melissa Lane (Politics, Princeton University)
  “Plato on the Nature of Rule: Technē and Archē in Plato’s Republic Book I”
  Published in 2020 in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 57.

2017–18

• Linda M.G. Zerilli (Political Science and Gender & Sexuality Studies, University of Chicago)
  “Democratic Judgment in an Age of ‘Alternative Facts’”
  Published in 2020 as “Fact-Checking and Truth-Telling in an Age of Alternative Facts” in Le Foucauldien 6 (1).

2016–17

• Ryan Balot (Political Science and Classics, University of Toronto)
  “The ‘Truest Tragedy’ in Plato’s Laws“
• Larissa Atkison (Political Science, Northwestern)
  “The Ajax Problem: Sophocles and the Politics of Good Sense”
• Don Herzog (Political Science and Law, University of Michigan)
  “Sovereignty, R.I.P.”
  Published in 2020 in Sovereignty, R.I.P. (New Haven: Yale University Press).
• Edith Hall (Classics, King’s College, London)
  “That Goblin Word: Why We Need to Rethink What We and Aristophanes Mean by Demagogue”
• Alexander Schmidt (Historische Institut, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena)
  “Rights of Man Redefined: Fichte’s Legal Positivism as Response to the Crisis of Natural Law”

2015–16

• Jack Turner (Political Science, University of Washington)
  “Frederick Douglass and Political Judgment: The Post-Reconstruction Years”
  Published in 2018 in A Political Compasion to Frederick Douglass, edited by Neil Roberts (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky)
• Karuna Mantena (Political Science, Yale University)
  “Gandhi and the Dilemmas of Action”

2014–15

• Helga Varden (Philosophy and Women’s & Gender Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
  “Kant and Women”
  Published in 2017 in Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 98 (4): 653–694.