Below you can find descriptions of courses I have designed and taught at Duke University, Lake Forest College, and the American University in Bulgaria. Syllabi are available upon request.

“Recent Developments in Frankfurt School Critical Theory” (graduate seminar, Duke University)

The goal of this course is to familiarize students with recent developments in the tradition of Frankfurt School Critical Theory. By way of background, we will begin with some foundational texts by Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Hebert Marcuse, Friedrich Pollock, and Jürgen Habermas, and then focus on recent work that has come out in the last two decades or so. The emphasis will be on topics such as cultural critique, liberal rights, democratic theory, global justice and global governance, normativity, ethics, law, transatlantic relations, and political economy. We will focus on recent contributions by authors such as Jürgen Habermas, Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser, Claus Offe, Axel Honneth, Rainer Forst, Christoph Menke, Cristina Lafont, Rahel Jaeggi, Wolfgang Streeck, Wendy Brown, and Andreas Kalyvas. Our aim throughout will be to understand how these new works develop the critical theory tradition in new directions, and to ask whether their contributions add any new and useful insights to our understanding of contemporary society.

“Introduction to American Political Thought” (undergraduate seminar, Duke University)

James Baldwin once claimed that “American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.” In this course, we will seek to understand the rich complexity of American political history by looking at the equally rich traditions that have attempted to provide intellectual representations of it. What are the major intellectual traditions that have shaped American political thought from the early colonial days to our contemporary age? In pursuit of this inquiry, we will be reading texts falling under a great variety of genres: from systematic treatises to pamphlets, declarations, letters, court decisions, speeches, lectures, novels and even a poem. Though they may belong to different discursive modes, all of these texts speak, in one way or another, to such prominently ethical-political topics as freedom, property, equality, self-ownership, solidarity, independence, civic rights and duties, education, democracy, citizenship, individualism, and many more. A major objective of this class will be to foster the ability of students to pay critical attention to both the contextual particularities of United States’ political history and their conceptual representation in political theory. In addition, the class will also aim to help students develop the ability to evaluate the meaning and significance of the contributions of American political thought to the history of Western political theory. 

“Great Political Ideas” (Lake Forest College)

Such familiar concepts as the state, sovereignty, justice, tolerance, solidarity, democracy, civil disobedience, liberalism, communism, anarchism, and many more are all coinages of the rich intellectual tradition of political thought. Although philosophers have been the traditional contributors in this realm of intellectual activity, the history of political thought goes beyond their formal treatises on matters ethical-political; it also includes, for example, contributions to political thinking made by people of various walks of life who were actively involved in actual politics, whether as statesmen or as grassroots social and political activists. Whereas as political philosophy political thought assumes the form of doctrine and as such presents us with an object that is amenable to formal systematic interrogation, as reflection on ongoing political practice it typically assumes the less rigid forms of the political essay, the collection of fragmentary aphorisms, prison notebooks, pamphlets, and so on. In this course, we will read selections of political writing belonging to all of these genres. The course is organized along the following lines. The first part is an introduction to the nature of political-theoretic inquiry and its relevance to the understanding of social and political reality. The second part is an introductory exploration of five paradigms of political-theoretic inquiry in the history of Western political thought across different epochs: namely, classical antiquity, Christian Middle Ages, and early and late European modernity. The course concludes with a third part in which we explore two prominent topics in contemporary political theory—namely, multicultural tolerance and the future of Western liberal democracy. The major goal of the course is to give students the ability to understand and appreciate the meaning and significance of political thought as one part of humanity’s rich and varied intellectual traditions. 

“Introduction to Global Politics” (Lake Forest College)

This course is an introduction to the scholarly study of global politics. As is often the case with terms of political discourse, global politics is a contested term. Yet this does not mean that there can be no disciplined investigation of its subject matter. Within the scholarly discipline of Political Science, global politics is investigated by two of its four major subfields, namely Comparative Politics (CP) and International Relations (IR). Roughly speaking, whereas the first is primarily interested in questions having to do with the determinants of domestic political development (e.g., the origins of the state, political culture, the nature of political regimes, the relationship between economic development and form of political rule, etc.), the latter focuses on questions pertaining to relations between nation states (e.g., war and peace). As we shall see in this course, however, this division of labor is not so neat in actual scholarly practice. Many political science scholars do important work at the intersection of the two subfields. That is because a great many topics of interest to political scientists (e.g., the European Union, global social movements, etc.) can be approached only by a combination of the methodological outlooks presupposed as separate and distinct by the division between comparative politics and international relations. This course will introduce students to the methodological outlook and the corresponding puzzles studied by the practitioners of these two scholarly subfields. Students will learn about the ways in which different methodological outlooks condition the evaluation of the scientific merit of questions of global politics, key concepts of the scholarly study of global politics, the most important puzzles studied by scholars of comparative politics and international relations, and the variety of answers that scholars have given to such puzzles. Throughout the course, we will keep an eye on both the formal and the historical character of the scholarly study of global politics. 

“The Theory and Practice of Human Rights” (undergraduate seminar, American University in Bulgaria)

This course is an investigation into the theory and practice of human rights. The practice of human rights has become a deeply entrenched part of our contemporary legal and political landscape. Expressions such as human rights courts, human rights declarations, human rights lawyers, and human rights violations are ubiquitous in daily news headlines. In fact, the practice of human rights, as is also the case with many other domains of human affairs, is quite ahead of the theory of human rights. But, as we shall learn in this course, this does not mean that the practice has no need for the theory. Quite the opposite, as human rights lawyers are ready to admit, the theoretical attention of political and moral philosophers is much needed in this domain.  What are human rights? Who is their subject? Whose responsibility are human rights? Are they to be understood as legal rights only, or do they have the status of moral rights, too? If so, how are we to understand the relationship between legality and morality? What is human dignity? Keeping these and similar questions in mind, this course will examine some of the major contemporary philosophical and political-theoretic contributions to the understanding of human rights. Our aim will be to understand and critically assess these contributions.  

“Introduction to Global Politics” (American University in Bulgaria)

This course is an introduction to the scholarly study of global politics. The scholarly study of global politics is known within the discipline of Political Science as International Relations (IR). This course will introduce students to the different ways in which IR scholars go about investigating global politics; their arguments about what are the right questions; their theoretical frameworks; and the unavoidable methodological and ideological debates that characterize the scholarly disputes between them. Throughout the course we will keep an eye on the irreducibly historical character of IR theory. Whereas the first part of the course presents IR studies as conceptual responses to a rather chronological order of major historical events, the second part breaks with that logic of presentation in order to offer an eclectic selection of themes from contemporary IR studies. A key goal of the course will be to give students the ability to appreciate not only the formal ambition of the theory of international relations, but also its historical context.