I am a political theorist who writes on the history of political thought and critical theory, broadly construed.

My first book project, based on my dissertaition “Penal Modernism before Modernity: Correction and Confinement in the History of Political Thought”, advances a new theory of how penal incarceration came to capture the Western philosophical imagination. It traces institutional accounts of incarceration, the moral psychology of crime and the political economy of punishment from Plato’s Athens to Jeremy Bentham’s London, with an eye towards our present carceral dysfunction.

I have  published and taught on the history of political thought from classical antiquity to the present day. My ongoing research interests include social and political philosophy from early modernity through the critical theorists, Jewish and Islamic political thought, classical philosophy, and the philosophical basis of political economy.

I hold a BA (Hons.) in Philosophy from Yale University (2010), and completed M.Phils in Political Thought and Intellectual History (2011) and Ancient Philosophy (2012) at Cambridge, where I was a Paul Mellon Fellow at Clare College until 2013. After receiving my doctorate from Harvard’s Government Department, I was the 2019-2020 Harvard-Tel Aviv Exchange Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Tel Aviv University.