Interests

Broadly, my research interests include the history of modern political thought (15th-21st century), comparative political theory (African, Asian, and European diasporic), and intellectual history. I focus primarily on questions concerning empire/colonialism, religion & politics, and international law.

MONOGRAPh

An Appeal to the World: Creolizing Domination in the Political Thought of Montesquieu, Fukuzawa, and Du Bois (Rowman & Littlefield/Bloomsbury, 2024)

An Appeal to the World reconstructs how three distinguished political philosophers challenged transnational domination—namely, forms of arbitrary political and economic control across national borders—through distinct, but comparable, philosophical frameworks geared toward a range of global contexts.

For Montesquieu, despotic formulations remain the most alarming kinds of domination but can effectively be resisted through an emphasis on contextualized forms of moderation. Fukuzawa’s key concern with domination centers on dependent relations but can be resisted through an emphasis on contextualized forms of independence. Du Bois, for his part, remains primarily concerned with domination as it manifests in discriminatory ontologies, and he challenges these through an emphasis on contextualized solidarity and self-determination.

An Appeal to the World creolizes these authors’ reflections through three cases on Egypt, China, and England that feature across each author’s writing , highlighting both shortcomings of each thinker’s conclusions and how, collectively, they offer a more circumspect approach to resisting transnational domination. In so doing, An Appeal to the World challenges and seeks to conceptually and methodologically move beyond transnational good governance and developed/developing frameworks that continue to bedevil international organizations in the present.

WORKING MANUSCRIPTS

I am in the early stages of two intellectual history/history of political thought projects:

• Blessed are the Peacemakers: The Pan-African Conference & Congresses, 1900-2014
• Aligning Interests: An Intellectual History of the Bandung Conference and NAM, 1955-2024

ArticleS & Working Papers

• “‘Leaders Fit for the Masses’: Du Bois and Japan’s Transnational Democratic Leadership,” Du Bois Review 21.1 (Spring 2024), 182-200.

• “Montesquieu’s Paradoxical Spirit of Moderation: On the Making of Asian Despotism in De l’esprit des lois” Political Theory 46.6 (December 2018), 915-937.

• “‘One Love’ – The Politics of Collective Liberation for Black and Chinese Jamaicans in Hills of Hebron” (drafted)

• “‘The New and Grand Career of Justice’: Frederick Douglass, Chinese Immigration, and Imperial Temptations” (drafted)

• “Toward a Buddhist Christianity – The Swamp, Priests, and Political Persecution in Shūsaku Endō’s Silence” (in preparation)

REVIEWS

• Review of W. E. B. Du Bois, Ethiopianism, and Black Internationalism: A New Interpretation of the Global Color Line by Ras Wayne A. Rose, H-Diplo (forthcoming).

• Review of Montesquieu: Let There Be Enlightenment by Catherine Volpilhac-Auger and translated by Philip Stewart, Perspectives on Politics 21.4 (December 2023).

• Review of Handbook of Confucianism in Modern Japan edited by Shaun O’Dwyer, Journal of Confucian Philosophy and Culture 40 (August 2023).

Support

My research has been supported by the U.S. Department of Education, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Mustard Seed Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the American Political Science Association, among others.