Nicholas Xenos, Director
Nicholas Xenos is Professor of Political Science at UMass Amherst. He is the author of Scarcity and Modernity (Routledge 1989) and Cloaked in Virtue: Unveiling Leo Strauss and the Rhetoric of American Foreign Policy (Routledge 2008). An Alumnus Fellow of the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University, he has held visiting professorships in Rhetoric at UC Berkeley and Political Science at Amherst College.
Angelica Bernal
Angélica Maria Bernal is Assistant Professor of Political Science, and faculty affiliate with the Center for Latin American, Latin@ and Caribbean Studies at UMASS, Amherst. Her research and teaching interests are in revolutionary and refoundational politics, critical social theory, indigenous social movements, extractivism, power, and resistance. She has published articles in Constellations, New Political Science, and The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought. She recently completed a book titled Beyond Origins: Rethinking Founding in an Age of Constitutional Democracy (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Angélica is a graduate of Yale (PhD 2008) and an alumnus of Cornell’s School of Criticism and Theory.
Yasmeen Daifallah
Yasmeen Daifallah is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Middle Eastern Studies at UMass, Amherst. Yasmeen’s teaching and research interests are in postcolonial theory, classical and modern Islamic thought, and theorizations of political subjectivity and revolution. Yasmeen is herself a graduate of the critical theory program at UC Berkeley, where she completed her degree in political science in 2012. She is currently completing a book manuscript on overcoming the tradition-modernity binary in contemporary Arab political thought.
Thomas Dumm
Thomas L. Dumm is the William H. Hastie ’25 Professor of Political Ethics at Amherst College. He is the author of Democracy and Punishment: Disciplinary Origins of the United States, (1987), united states, (1994), Michel Foucault and the Politics of Freedom (1996, second edition, 2002), A Politics of the Ordinary (1999), Loneliness As a Way of Life (2008), and My Father’s House: On Will Barnet’s Paintings (2014). He has also co-edited two books, and co-edited special issues of Theory&Event (on the 2004 American presidential election, with Jodi Dean (January, 2005)), and on 9/11 and After, with Wendy Brown (January, 2002). His articles, essays, reviews and interviews have appeared in a variety of journals in the fields of political theory and literary studies, including Political Theory, Critical Inquiry, The Believer, and others. He was the founding co-editor of Theory&Event, serving from 1996 to 2001. He has served as the associate editor of The Massachusetts Review 2002-2005 and as editor for non-Fiction, 2005-2009. His current research concerns the (im)possibility of home in the 21st century.
Andrew Poe
Andrew Poe is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. His research and teaching interests are in critical democratic theory, histories of modern European social and political thought, modes of resistance, political theology, and radicalism. Since 2009, he has been a recurring research fellow at the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt, Germany, conducting a research project on dimensions of political fanaticism. His published research (current and forthcoming) addresses such topics as revolution, political emotion, enthusiasm, temporality, modernity, and democratic fanaticism. He is currently completing a book manuscript on the genealogy of political enthusiasm.
Jord/ana Rosenberg
Jord/ana Rosenberg is an Associate Professor in the English Department at UMass-Amherst. Their book, Critical Enthusiasm: Capital Accumulation and the Transformation of Religious Passion, was published in 2011 by Oxford University Press. They have co-edited special journal issues on queer studies and financial crisis, and on early modern dispossession. Their current work in progress is a theory/fiction hybrid, The Desire Hunters (House of Waste).
Adam Sitze
Adam Sitze is Associate Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst College. He is author of The Impossible Machine: A Genealogy of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (University of Michigan Press, 2013). With Timothy Campbell of Cornell University, he is editor of Biopolitics: A Reader (Duke University Press, 2013). He has also edited Carlo Galli’s Political Spaces and Global War (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and The Janus Gaze: Essays on Carl Schmitt (Duke University Press, 2015). With Margaret Groesbeck, he is co-translator of Adriana Cavarero and Angelo Scola’s Thou Shalt Not Kill: A Political and Theological Dialogue (Fordham University Press, 2015).
Michael Stein
Michael Stein is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research interests include critical theory, consumerism, financialization and contemporary critiques of capitalism. Michael is currently working on his dissertation “An Immanent Critique of Political Consumerism” and as Director, Corporate and Foundation Relations at University of Massachusetts Amherst.