Research

My research engages critical theory, political theology, and revolutionary and juridical textual archives to offer new perspectives on the canon of political theory in the context of popular collective action. My dissertation, Profane Heaven: Utopia, Apocalypse, and the Politics of the Imagination, proposes a novel theory of utopia through reinterpretations of the fundamental texts of Early Modern political thought.

Profane Heaven recovers a crucial but largely overlooked fact: the first utopian authors were not primarily writing to imagine better worlds, but to counter the radical visions of their contemporary revolutionary opponents. Against dominant understandings of utopia as a potent figure for emancipatory political imagination, Profane Heaven returns to utopia’s Early Modern coinage to show how it was shaped by an anti-egalitarian impulse intended to delimit images of common property to the realm of fiction. Reading classic works of political theory in the context of the popular uprisings that unfolded as they were written, I demonstrate that the canon of political thought is a product of both philosophical and political repressions of revolutionary movements. Moreover, by showing that the traces of unruly collective movements can be as significant as the theoretical production of individual philosophers or political leaders, I expand the boundaries of what counts as “political thought” and  offer a significant methodological contribution for study of  historical of political thought. While new methods in political theory like the “archival turn” tend to add hitherto marginalized voices in the canon, they also often obscure how canonical political ideas have developed in direct antagonism to contemporaneous revolutionary movements—movements with their own rich archives of political concepts and forms that are resistant to inclusion in a shared project.

Reading three of the earliest written utopias in historical context, Profane Heaven argues that utopia was a genre of law, constitutionalism, and wealth and property accumulation in the 16th and 17th centuries. Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626), and James Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) created fictional spaces for working through fears of heretical lower-class rebellions in Europe and addressing the legal demands of colonial development and global maritime trade. These early utopian texts transformed ideas born of concrete struggles against private property into theoretical visions of ideal societies that left social domination unchallenged. Further, they furnished a new concept for the elite political imagination: utopia, u-topos–literally “no-place,” a secularized version of heaven. If heaven deferred the promise of happiness and universal abundance to the afterlife, utopian fiction functioned as a secular counterpart that depicted an ideal polis while reinforcing the impossibility of common ownership on earth. To illuminate the anti-revolutionary character of the first utopian authors, I juxtapose them to a counter-archive of their radical adversaries, all advocates of apocalyptic political ideas: Thomas Müntzer and the German Peasants' War (1525) against More; the anti-enclosure Enslow Hill rioters (1596) against Bacon; and the Diggers and Ranters (1642-1651) against Harrington. While Early Modern utopias relied on individual genius to imagine ideal states, revolutionary apocalyptic movements united what had been deliberately separated for the purposes of social domination: inner spiritual life and outer social structures, heaven and earth, words and deeds, and the rich and the poor.