Grounded in a comparative, interdisciplinary, and global perspective, I examine how different intellectual traditions across time and geography conceptualize the relationship between politics and accounts of a meaningful or purposeful life, with a present focus on modern Indigenous political thought in Oceania (the Pacific Islands region). 

 

My research is guided by the injunction in comparative political theory to expand our engagements with political texts not only beyond the European canon, but also into alternate genres of political theorizing, including literary works, material culture, and performance. This expansive perspective on political theorizing simultaneously requires an interdisciplinary and multi-method approach. In this vein, I combine the close reading and careful contextualization (attentive to economic, cultural, and political context at the local, regional, and global scales) that are core to the history of political thought with insights and methodological precepts drawn from Indigenous Pacific studies, transnational and global cultural studies, and postcolonial theory. 

 

My current research focuses on grassroots regionalist imaginaries and worldmaking in Indigenous Oceania, with particular attention to how economic and political transnational networks cohered by shared artistic, literary, and cultural spaces enable anti-imperial action both above and below the scale of the postcolonial state. Drawing primarily on the work of Tongan novelist and anthropologist Epeli Hauʻofa, Filipino-Pohnpeian scholar Vicente Diaz, and Black and Banaban poet and critical theorist Teresia Teaiwa, I emphasize how negotiations  between Indigenous belonging to place and myths, traditions, and contemporary realities of global mobility are core to regionalist thought and practice in Oceania. My work in this research strain has appeared or is forthcoming in Global Intellectual History, South Atlantic Quarterly, The Palgrave Handbook of Franz Fanon, and Progressive Planning Practice. Working papers in this research strain concern the political stakes of Hauʻofa’s Rabelaisian satire Kisses in the Nederends (for submission to Contemporary Political Theory), the unique dynamics of populist regionalism in Oceania (for submission to European Journal of Political Theory), and the radical decolonial cartography implied in Pacific ocean-centered cultural-political imaginaries (for submission to Theory & Event).

 

Beyond this, my dissertation project – Taming Religion, Managing Meaning – drew on a number of Euro-American scholars writing in the aftermath of Weber’s “disenchantment” thesis to generate theoretical insights relevant to the purported “crisis of meaning” currently animating (il)liberal politics in the United States and Europe. I am currently preparing two articles based on this dissertation project. One (for submission to Political Theory) condenses the overarching argument of the dissertation to critique the orthodox liberal attempt to consign questions of human meaning to the private sphere, while another (for submission to the Journal of the History of Ideas) emphasizes mass psychology à la Freud and Gustave Le Bon as a heretofore unrecognized influence on the work of the German-American philosopher Eric Voegelin.