Desmond Jagmohan
Desmond Jagmohan is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in the history of American and African American political thought, with a focus on the politics of the oppressed. His first book, Dark Virtues: The Tragic Realism of Booker T. Washington (Princeton University Press, October 2026), examines the politics of deception under Jim Crow. He is at work on two new projects: Three Traditions of African American Political Thought, an intellectual history spanning 1850 to 1970, and A Duty to Remember: Slavery and the Ethics of Memory. His work has appeared in the Journal of Politics, Political Theory, NOMOS, Annual Review of Political Science, Perspectives on Politics, Politics, Groups, and Identities, Contemporary Political Theory, and Boston Review.
In 2026, Jagmohan received the Distinguished Teaching Award, the University of California, Berkeley's highest honor for teaching, which only 233 faculty members have received since 1959. In 2025 he received the U.C. Berkeley’s Division of Social Sciences Distinguished Teaching Award. He received an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Research Fellowship (2026) and was a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Human Values (2022–23), a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University (2018), and the recipient of the American Political Science Association's Best Dissertation Award from the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section (2015). Before joining UC Berkeley, Jagmohan was Assistant Professor of Politics at Princeton University, where he delivered the 2018 Constitution Day Lecture and was awarded the Laurance S. Rockefeller Preceptorship.
Jagmohan holds a PhD and MA from Cornell University and served in the US military before and during his undergraduate at Northeastern Illinois University.
Dark Virtues offers a fundamental reinterpretation of Booker T. Washington’s life and thought. Washington is perhaps the most despised and maligned figure in African American history. He is now seen as a compromiser who traded his people’s rights for menial gains. Jagmohan argues that this portrait is a myth that Washington unwittingly aided by practicing a politics of deception. Drawing on voluminous archival records, he reveals that Washington relied on compromising means to pursue radical ends. Judging that Jim Crow was impervious to frontal assault—that open confrontation invited death and destruction—Washington concluded that equivocation, concealment, and deception were political virtues for the oppressed. To show why, Jagmohan reconstructs the extreme condition that compelled his tragic realism. Black southerners faced a racial tyranny maintained through disenfranchisement, segregation, economic thralldom, and white terrorism. Against that context, Jagmohan examines Washington’s rhetoric, writing, institution-building, and clandestine legal and political action, showing that he relied on an accommodating mask to conceal and aid a radical project. This more realist and tragic Washington forces a reconsideration of W. E. B. Du Bois’s self-serving portrait of him as mere compromiser, one that continues to distort the historical record That said, Dark Virtues does not rehabilitate Washington uncritically. Rather, it asks a hard question: What does resistance look like when the cost of public defiance is our livelihoods or even or lives? It offers a sober answer that remains painfully relevant: No one survives oppression morally unscathed.
Jagmohan is currently working on two additional book projects. The first is tentatively titled Three Traditions of African American Political Thought, which essentially argues that conflict rather than consensus defines the history of African American political thought; that its seminal figures have pursued justice along different and divergent lines, including advocating reformist, realist, and nationalist paths. The book traces these patterns of political thought and social action from the mid-nineteenth century through the civil rights era.
The second book project is titled, A Duty to Remember: Slavery and the Ethics of Memory. This project studies slave testimonies as constituting two forms of witnessing: political and moral. Antebellum slave narratives exemplified political witnessing by providing inculpatory evidence against slavery to aid its abolition. Postbellum slave testimonies—the thousands of WPA interviews with formerly enslaved people—constituted moral witnessing: with slavery abolished, these accounts treat testimony as morally valuable in itself. The significance is both normative and methodological. It argues that citizens have a duty to remember the experiences of survivors of national atrocities, distinct from any state duty to commemorate such events. Since states may distort public memory according to partisan whims, citizens should bear that duty to remember directly. By recovering the moral intuitions and normative arguments embedded in the memories of ordinary slaves—rather than only exceptional figures like Frederick Douglass or Harriet Jacobs—this project addresses the hermeneutical injustices around slave testimonies and offers a genuine intellectual history from below. This book brings the methodological skills honed in the digital humanities to bear on the historical contextualism practiced by historians of political thought.
He is also at work on a short (40k words) book titled How to Think About Resistance (for a new series by Oxford University Press)
Peer-Reviewed Articles & Book Chapters
“Lockeanism: The Image of John Locke in Cold War America,” The Political Thought of John Locke: New Perspectives, eds. David Armitage, Teresa M. Bejan, and Felix Waldmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2026), 206–230. Co-authored with Steven Kelts.
“Three Traditions of African American Political Thought: Realism, Reformism, and Nationalism,” Annual Review of Political Science 27 (July 2024): 47–61.
“Popular Republicanism and Racial Exclusion,” The Oxford Handbook of Republicanism, eds. Frank Lovett and Mortimer Sellers (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2024).
“Reparations without Reconciliation,” NOMOS LXV: Reconciliation and Repair, eds. Melissa Schwartzberg and Eric Beerbohm (New York: New York University Press: 2023), 140–180.
“Peculiar Property: Harriet Jacobs on the Nature of Slavery,” Journal of Politics 84, no. 2 (April 2022): 669–681.
“Booker T. Washington and the Politics of Deception,” African American Political Thought: A Collected History, eds. Melvin L. Rogers and Jack Turner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 167–191.
“Between Race and Nation: Marcus Garvey and the Politics of Self-Determination,” Political Theory 48, no. 3 (June 2020): 271–302.
“Race and the Social Contract: Charles Mills on the Consensual Foundations of White Supremacy,” Politics, Groups, and Identities 3, no. 3 (September 2015): 488–503.
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.