Desmond Jagmohan
Faculty
I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. I specialize in the history of American and African American political thought, American intellectual history, and the history of political thought. I also have research and teaching interests in theories of property, slavery, nationalism and self-determination, and Caribbean political theory. My current research focuses on political and moral agency under conditions of extreme oppression. At the moment I am completing my first book, Dark Virtues: Booker T. Washington’s Tragic Realism (under contract with Princeton University Press). Drawing on several years of archival research, I recover Washington as a virtue theorist of the oppressed. I have also begun working on my second book, which is tentatively titled, Veiled Agency. It reads Harriet Jacobs’s slave narrative as a work of moral and political theory that conceives of slavery as a distinct rather than merely an extreme form of oppression. It also reconstructs the tethered and often unseen forms of agency available to enslaved people. Chapter One, which is forthcoming from Journal of Politics, argues that ownership, rather than domination, constitutes slavery's deeper wrong. I have work forthcoming or published in Journal of Politics, Political Theory, Perspectives on Politics, Politics, Groups, and Identities, Contemporary Political Theory, and Boston Review. Prior to arriving at Berkeley, I was Assistant Professor of Politics at Princeton University.
I was the winner of the APSA Best Dissertation Award from the Race, Ethnicity and Politics Section (2015) and was a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University (2018). At Princeton University, I delivered the 2018 Constitution Day Lecture and was awarded the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Preceptorship in the University Center for Human Values. I hold an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Cornell University.
PUBLICATIONS:
"Peculiar Property: Harriet Jacobs on the Nature of Slavery," Journal of Politics (Forthcoming April 2022).