Assistant Professor
Specialization:
My research and thinking are broadly invested in the philosophical import of
anthropological inquiry, especially as it is expressed through ethnography and through
the dialogue it facilitates between concepts, texts, and traditions. My teaching and
writing works through this investment by examining the modern modes of power that
constitute liberalism, its normative force, and its history and contemporary iterations in
the United States. Modes that include war, security, police power, rights, law, crime,
slavery, and religion. I am also interested in the traditions that offer the equipment to
think through these modern modes of power, including traditions of economic, legal, and
political anthropology; the anthropology of Islam; semiotics and theories of language;
phenomenology; structuralism and poststructuralism; political and social theory; and the
reception and critique of Kant.
Education:
Ph.D. Sociocultural Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley
M.T.S. Philosophy of Religion, Harvard Divinity School
B.A. Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley
Research:
I am currently working on two manuscripts. The first, tentatively titled Counterinsurgent
Force: A Phenomenology of Enmity, is based on a year and a half of field research with
Islamic communities in North Carolina. It especially attends to how Islamic communities
wield the practices and sensibilities of security in order to guarantee, on the one hand,
the institutional presence and practice of the Islamic tradition and to engage, on the
other hand, the counterinsurgency and racial violence that they are subject to by
civilians, law enforcement agencies, and legal institutions. The second manuscript
reconstructs an anthropology of slavery through a study in the formation of civil rights,
the police power, and their relationship to enslavement before and after the American
Civil War. This project thinks through the kind of equality promised to the formerly
enslaved, how it was enforced through civil rights, and how the conditions of their
distribution was met with a counterrevolutionary movement (in law, criminal justice, and
political economy) that upset their possibility.
Publications:
Referred Journal Articles
“The Nomos of the Mosque: The Logic of Liberalism, Security, and the Islamic
Tradition,” American Religion (2022)
“Whither Transcendence? Immanence and Critique in The Self-Emptying Subject,”
Sophia: International Journal of Philosophy and Traditions (2022)
“Courting Dialectics,” Book Forum on Garrett Felber’s Those Who Know Don’t Say: The
Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State, Journal for Civil
and Human Rights (2021)
Under Review/In Preparation
Counterinsurgent Force: A Phenomenology of Enmity (ms in progress)
“Binding Forces: Obligation and Liberalism” (in progress)
“The Anthropology of Islam and its Antinomy” (under review)
“An Anthropology of Equality: Toward an Understanding of Ontological Fabulation”
(under review)
Courses:
I teach courses across a variety of topics and areas of competence, including war, law,
the political, liberalism, slavery, security, religion, rights, crime, psychological and
phenomenological anthropology, semiotics, and the history of anthropological theory.