Ph.D. New York University
European Intellectual History; Modern France

I earned my doctorate at New York University, where I defended a dissertation entitled "Society Incarnate: Association, Society, and Religion in French Political Thought, 1825-1912." It examines the ways in which nineteenth-century republican and socialist thinkers drew upon religious discourse to speculate about how a post-corporate and post-revolutionary society might foster robust social bonds. Debates about religion, I argue, become an important terrain for assessing the respective weight a modern political order should assign to the claims of "individualism" as opposed to those of "society."

In addition to nineteenth-century political philosophy, I am also interested in recent French political thought. In particular, I am working on a project that examines the role played by Michel Foucault played in ushering in the "liberal turn" in French thought during the 1970s.

Finally, I also write about American politics and political thought for several French publications, including La Vie des Idées, an online journal, and Alternatives Internationales, a French magazine dedicated to international affairs (see my blog).

Recent Publications:

“Accidents Happen: François Ewald, the Anti-Revolutionary Foucault, and the Intellectual Politics of the French Welfare State,” Journal of Modern History, forthcoming (2010).

"Liberalism without Humanism: Michel Foucault and the Free-Market Creed, 1976-1979," Modern Intellectual History, (2009).

"The Mystical Body of Society: Religion and Association in Nineteenth-Century French Political Thought," (505 KB pdf) Journal of the History of Ideas (2008).

"Le débat Guyau-Durkheim sur la théorie sociologique de la religion. Une nouvelle querelle des universaux?" Archives de sciences sociales des religions (2008).

"Religion, Republicanism, and Depoliticization: Two Intellectual Itineraries—Régis Debray and Marcel Gauchet," in Julian Bourg, ed., After the Deluge: New Perspectives on the Intellectual and Cultural History of Postwar France (Lexington Books, 2004), 325-349.