Desmond Jagmohan
I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Like many Berkeley undergraduates, my path to academic life was circuitous. Born and raised in Guyana, I migrated to Chicago at sixteen and served in the U.S. military before and during college. I specialize in the history of American and African American political thought, with a focus on the politics of the oppressed. My first book, Dark Virtues: Booker T. Washington’s Tragic Realism (forthcoming, Princeton University Press), examines the politics of deception under Jim Crow and my second project, Slavery & Subversion: The Political Thought of Harriet Jacobs, reinterprets her slave narrative as a work of moral and political theory that outlines what I call veiled agency. So far, my work has appeared in the Journalof Politics, Political Theory, NOMOS, Annual Review of Political Science, Perspectives on Politics, Politics, Groups, and Identities, Contemporary Political Theory, and Boston Review.
I received the 2025 Social Science Distinguished Teaching Award at UC Berkeley. I was the Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellow at Princeton’s University Center for Human Values (2022–23), a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford (2018), and the recipient of the APSA Best Dissertation Award from the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section (2015). Before joining Berkeley, I taught at Princeton as Assistant Professor of Politics, delivered the 2018 Constitution Day Lecture, and held the Laurance S. Rockefeller Preceptorship. I hold an M.A. and Ph.D. from Cornell University.
I study the politics of the oppressed. My first book, Dark Virtues: Booker T. Washington’s Tragic Realism (forthcoming from Princeton University Press) treats Booker T. Washington as an ethical case study in four parts. Part I reconstructs his account of white supremacy as a durable regime, impervious to protest and immune to moral appeal—one that required a long siege (Chs. 1–2). Part II contends that he thought this siege demanded the cultivation of dark virtues: equivocation (Ch. 3), concealment (Ch. 4), and deception (Ch. 5). These morally suspect traits, Washington insisted, were justified by the extremity of the conditions. Drawing on years of archival research, Part III uncovers the radical politics behind his accommodating mask: covert legal resistance to Jim Crow (Ch. 6), economic empowerment initiatives (Ch. 7), and the quiet fortification of civic life through independent institutions (Ch. 8). Part IV confronts the ethical toll of his method by turning to his most formidable critic, W. E. B. Du Bois, who warned of the cost of deception (Ch. 9). The final chapter (Ch. 10) argues that Washington’s realism was tragic because it was politically necessary and morally scarring. Dark Virtues is both a study of Washington’s political thought and an inquiry into deception and dissimulation in African American political life under Jim Crow.
My second book will examine the political thought of Harriet Jacobs by situating Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl within the proslavery and antislavery discursive terrain of mid-nineteenth-century America. Unlike Washington, Jacobs left no archive. The interpretive challenge of Dark Virtues was to develop a method for reading a writer who wrote under fear of persecution, who lied as a means of survival. I spent years in the archives uncovering the radical ends his politics of deception made possible. Jacobs presents the opposite problem. She left a single, openly radical, philosophically rich text but no archive. Yet, this work was forged in response to a proslavery public discourse now largely forgotten, and within an antislavery one we have also ceased to understand. To apprehend the rhetorical and philosophical power of her work, we must reconstruct several contexts. First, I will analyze proslavery texts using automated text analysis to identify dominant and latent themes, track their evolution, and examine how they provoked replies from slave narrators like Jacobs. Second, I will do the same for the antislavery public sphere, showing where Jacobs might have broken new ground. Third, working with my colleague Gabe Lenz, I am digitizing the full WPA slave narratives and related collections to perform similar analysis on the memories of the enslaved (a data-set we will make available for public use). This computational work will not replace close reading. It is meant to strengthen it, to offer a more empirically grounded account of the ideas that shaped Jacobs’s world and her resistance. The goal is not to flatten exceptional texts into data, but to illuminate the buried architecture of the ideational worlds they sought to challenge.
Alongside this project, I am completing a short book on How to Think About Resistance for Oxford University Press.
Articles and Book Chapters
"Lockeanism: The Image of John Locke in Cold War America," accepted and forthcoming in The Political Thought of John Locke: New Perspectives, eds. David Armitage, Terea Bejan, and Felix Waldman (Oxford University Press).
Essays and Reviews
I teach a range of courses in the history of American and African American political thought, as well as courses in American Politics, from race and American political development to political culture. I also offer a recurring seminar on resistance.