About Me

I am an assistant professor of Political Science at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ, working at the intersections of feminist, queer, and critical race theories. My work focuses in particular on how everyday political actors have deployed these traditions to build coalitions, how they seek to contest and repair the inequalities that underpin modern political communities, and how they imagine radical futures premised on racial and sexual accountability.

My current research reconstructs a range of radical political claims made by lesbian feminist writers and activists ranging from the late 1970s through the early 1990s, turning to feminist political archives often overlooked by political theorists, such as the popular lesbian magazine Sinister Wisdom. The project shows that the practice of intersectional responsibility developed by lesbians such as Cherríe Moraga, Audre Lorde, Barbara and Beverly Smith, Adrienne Rich, and Monique Wittig, among others, offers valuable insights for theorists grappling with how to imagine more radical and accountable coalitions in the present. I argue that while the political challenges posed by lesbians have historically been considered less sophisticated than “third wave” queer theories, the lesbian conception of accountability is a point of contact with contemporary theories of grounded responsibility, such as in contemporary debates over trans liberation, Indigenous sovereignty and land repatriation, and reparations.

At Rutgers, I teach courses in the Women and Politics subfield, where I bring together ideas at the intersection of Political Theory, feminist theory, and histories of sexuality. I am pleased to offer a range of courses, including The Nature of Politics, Gender and Political Theory, Contemporary Feminist Theory, and Marx and Marxisms. Each of these courses is designed to put the core questions of Political Theory – what is freedom? who gets to be free? what are the best ways to contest arbitrary power? – in conversation with Women, Gender, and Sexuality studies, anti-colonial political thought in the U.S., and on qualitative and historical methods.