-
22Review of Karen Green, A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1700-1800 (Cambridge University Press) (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews --. 2016.
-
18Review of Lee Ward, Modern Democracy and the Theological-Political Problem in Spinoza, Rousseau, and Jefferson (review)Perspectives on Politics 14 (3): 872-874. 2016.
-
17Book Review: The Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft, by Sandrine Bergès and Alan Coffee (review)Political Theory 47 (6): 904-911. 2019.
-
9Wollstonecraft's Gothic ViolencePolity. forthcoming.This paper introduces the concept of gothic violence in order to better theorize how domination operates in Mary Wollstonecraft’s unfinished novel, The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria. The fictive companion to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Maria is an account of the titular character’s struggle for self-determination in all aspects of her life, including her desire for a companionate partnership. I argue that Maria’s ultimate lack of freedom is directly attributable to coverture, the patriarch…Read more
-
8Moving Hearts: Cultivating Patriotic Affect in Rousseau’s Considerations on the Government of PolandLaw, Culture and the Humanities 15 (2). 2019.Rousseau’s embrace of ceremony and festivals in his Considerations on the Government of Poland demonstrates one way for republican political thought to develop a substantive treatment of civic virtue. Differentiating the narcissism of spectacle and theater that Rousseau critiques in the Letter to d’Alembert from the Considerations’ call for a generous affect, I demonstrate that the latter is compatible with a republican ethos premised on civic virtue and patriotic attachment to the nation-state.…Read more
-
Fear, Liberty, and Honorable Death in Montesquieu’s Persian LettersEighteenth-Century Fiction 28 (4): 623-644. 2016.I read Montesquieu’s 'Persian Letters' as an attempt to theorize a liberated alternative to despotic rule. As Montesquieu argues in 'The Spirit of the Laws,' fear—specifically fear of the ruler’s emotional and material excesses—dominates the life of the despotic subject. Although in the 'Letters' the seraglio is the despotic state’s parallel, the seraglio is the site of over owing and barely governed passions. Montesquieu’s solution to the excesses of the seraglio is not the eradication of emoti…Read more
Tuscaloosa, Alabama, United States of America