I have three ongoing research projects:

Religious Passions in International Politics
My first research project stems from my dissertation, Impassioned Religion in International Politics, which I am preparing as a manuscript for publication. From colonial practices designed to civilize indigenous communities, to counter-terrorism initiatives aimed at de-radicalizing dissidents in the wake of the War on Terror, to controversies over blasphemy and religious harm in international law, religious passions are cast as a specter of unreason, treason, and radicalization. Seen as the dark under-belly of failed secularization, governments often fear demands for legal protection from religious offense or emotional harm because such demands threaten the norms of liberal tolerance, or worse, aim to supplant and overturn the liberal order entirely. In contrast to this dominant narrative, my dissertation Impassioned Religion in International Politics traces how the symbolic vocabulary, legal forms, and doctrinal tensions – the politics – of religious blasphemy and offense have been generated and negotiated in relation to British colonial criminal codes, US counter-terrorism initiatives, and the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights. It describes how historical and colonial practices of circumscribing religion became the dominant international legal and political framing of what is distinguished as religious offense and feelings. As I demonstrate, attention to these representations of religious emotional harm is crucial because such discourses affirm particular notions of political identity and authority that differentially impact minority and majority religious communities.

To illuminate the otherwise invisible processes by which emotions come to be transformed and reproduced, I use an empirical strategy that examines religious emotions as social performances whose meaning and form shift in relation to their institutional and legal context. Combining original archival work ranging from court records, legislatives debates, print and visual media, and secondary ethnographic and historical reports, I trace transformations in the legal and security discourses surrounding religious emotion with a political analysis of the shifting normative ideas and expressive strategies they generate. This research is informed by a diverse set of academic literatures including religious studies, affect and emotion theory, socialization, secularism studies, and legal analysis.

For an extended overview of my dissertation, click here.

Religious Offense: Postcolonial Politics and  Religious Freedom
My second research project will examine the postcolonial regulation of religious emotions in relation to contemporary US foreign policy. Tracking the reasoning and judgements in cases surrounding laws on religious offense based on the colonial Indian Penal Code, I will trace how these laws have been re-interpreted and strategically mobilized by postcolonial governments within changing conceptions of the rule of law, sovereignty, and internal order. Doing so will clarify the historical-institutional contingencies that have led to legal and political formations designed to adjudicate religious tolerance and harmony that differ from the universalist commitment to liberal rights found in most religious freedom advocacy efforts. Connecting these themes to contemporary US foreign policy, I will examine the power dynamics of US “religious freedom” initiatives in relation to the growth of funding for counter-radicalism partnerships across the Global South, exploring the orders and exclusions generated by the selective condemnation and collaboration with these states and communities that are understood to be susceptible to radicalization.

Arendt and the Political Theology of Emotion
My third project investigates Hannah Arendt’s political-theological account of emotion and the “mind” in relation to thinking and acting in times of crisis. Critics often frame Arendt’s writings about the appearance of emotions in public life as a series of warnings against emotions potential to intrude and disrupt political action and speech. This project, however, uses the The Life of the Mind to show that Arendt’s late attention to the soul, the site of emotions, was not dismissive but vital to her final stand against the encroaching perspectives of worldlessness she noted with alarm in The Origins of Totalitarianism and dwelled on throughout the later works of her career.  Central to this Life of the Mind, noted by many, is a plainly dismissive attitude toward the psychological and philosophical concern with the inscrutable character of one’s true inner self. Central to this critique of interiority, ignored by many, is a reconceptualizing of the soul’s relation to the mind and body that foregrounds her intervention against both technocratic and neo-Kantian liberal theories of the public rationality. My argument centers on an analysis of her account of the phenomenological and hermeneutic experience of the relationship between the mind, body, and soul. I clarify Arendtian conceptions of emotion and performed political emotions in the "public space of appearances," sorting through the differentiations Arendt posits between and among emotions, passions, feelings, sentiments, pleasures, and appearances. By bringing these differentiations to bear on her understanding of the soul’s relation to political principles and "sentiments" (linked in turn to politics), I address how we might amplify some aspects of Arendt's perhaps idiosyncratic engagement with all of the above to show some broader implications that attend theorizing a political phenomenology of emotion and its relation to processes of (mis)recognition, disruptive politics, and democratic membership.  This work will be ongoing with my involvement in the Arendt on Earth project.