I am Phyllis C. Rappaport ‘68 New Century Term Assistant Professor of Government and a political theorist at Smith College, an historically women’s college in Northampton, Massachusetts. My research focuses on the ethics and politics of (non)violent resistance, drawing from resources in Black political thought, anticolonial political thought, and democratic theory. I am particularly interested in discourses about mass (non)violence—how people “see” resistance—under conditions of colonial and racial domination, and in the wild acts of imagination that create and sustain transnational solidarities.

My first book, Seeing Like an Activist: Civil Disobedience and the Civil Rights Movement (OUP 2021), shows how civil rights activists, in concert with anticolonial movements across the globe, turned to civil disobedience as a practice of decolonization in order to emancipate themselves and others, and in the process transform the racial order. In 2022, my book was awarded the Foundations of Political Theory Best First Book Prize from the American Political Science Association.

New projects include work on the concept of internal colonialism, the grassroots politics of self-emancipation, and policing as a violent spectacle. The latter is the start of a new book project on policing in political theory.

Before coming to Smith, I was Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar in Political Science at the University of Chicago and a Faculty Affiliate at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture. I received my doctorate in Political Science in 2015 from Yale University, and hold a Bachelor’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies from Barnard College.

Over there, that’s a photo of me with a baby cashmere goat. He has nothing to do with my research or anything else on this website. But I wish he did.