I am a political theorist and intellectual historian specializing in democratic theory and twentieth-century political thought. In my work, I examine how the idea and practice of democracy is historically shaped by surrounding political, socioeconomic, and technological conditions, and engage in contemporary debates in light of my findings. I take an interdisciplinary approach and integrate social theory, political economy, and the philosophy and history of social science into my work. Substantively, I write about democratic theory, capitalism, neoliberalism, populism, and technology and politics.
In my recent book, The Eclipse of the Demos: The Cold War and the Crisis of Democracy before Neoliberalism (University Press of Kansas, 2020) (Winner of the APSA Foundations of Political Theory First Book Award), I show how self-undermining tendencies were built into democratic theory as it underwent a multifaceted transformation during the Cold War. I am currently writing a book on the rise of finance capital in the late twentieth century and its implications for democratic citizenship, entitled The Great Disintegration: Financialization and the Transformation of Democratic Citizenship.