My dissertation, "The Meaning of Land in Nineteenth-Century American Thought," is an inquiry into what I call the politics of the "ordinary." This refers to, in this case, an ordinary or mundane object of study - land - and texts that are pedestrian, popular, or low-brow, at least compared to the more "high-brow" tracts and treatises typically privileged by political theorists. I examine treaties, council minutes, letters, autobiographies, speeches, and even children's novels to demonstrate how various conceptualizations of land configure, constellate, and articulate with notions of sovereignty and freedom. Presently consisting of four chapters on William Henry Harrison, Black Hawk (Sauk), ​the 1852 U.S. Congress, and the novelist, Laura Ingalls Wilder, respectively, I plan to add chapters that explore how land shapes notions of nationhood in the writings of Zitkala-Ša (Yankton Lakota) and W.E.B. Du Bois. The resulting book will contribute to a growing literature that has begun to critique the core ideas, thinkers, and narratives of American political thought from a postcolonial perspective.

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Future research will continue to push the boundaries of what constitutes "the text" in political theory. One project, tentatively titled Surviving America, will trace the development of survivalist ideology in the late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century. Centering the immensely popular television series, CBS' Survivor, it will put the show in conversation with its literary antecedents (e.g. William Golding's Lord of the Flies (1954)) and televisual contemporaries (e.g. Lost, Surviorman, Man vs. Wild), as well as a long history of DIY, fringe, anarchic, and far-right political movements in United States, which, despite differences, all combine millenarian/apocalyptic beliefs with practical survival instruction and masculinist, anti-government ideology in their magazines, pamphlets, and manifestos. This project will develop "survivalism" as a settler-colonial construct that is specifically tailored to the Anthropocene and which poses a threat to global democracy, transnational solidarity, and widespread human flourishing in a warmer, wetter world. 

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A second project transcribes and analyzes a diary written by a white student attending Fisk University, a historically-black institution, in the spring of 1957. Benjamin F. Powell (my maternal grandfather) records his daily observations of racial apartheid in Nashville, TN, the political and social attitudes of his African-American peers, and his participation in a burgeoning civil disobedience movement. Putting the diary in conversation with other texts like Martin Luther King, Jr.'s early speeches and Nella Larsen's novel, Passing (1929), this project will explore how class and "colorism" influenced Black solidarity in the movement for civil rights.