From colonial practices designed to civilize indigenous communities, to counter-terrorism initiatives aimed at de-radicalizing dissidents in the wake of the War on Terror, to controversies over blasphemy and religious harm cases in international law, religious passions have been cast as a specter of unreason, treason, and radicalization. These assumptions sustain...
This dissertation argues that the nineteenth-century construction of “emotional susceptibility” turned a much-derided quirk of psychology—the long retention of one’s earliest affective impressions—into a basis for radical interventions into thinking about attachment, ethics, and the Victorian novel. I focus in particular on the work of Henry Mackenzie, Charlotte Brontë, George...
This dissertation is situated at the intersection of critical philosophy of race, affect theory, and new media studies. The dominant questions of my research consider what new problems and avenues of thought the digital age and social media open up for the study of race. This focus includes the ways...