My teaching and research are grounded in the recognition that the discipline of philosophy has historically been—and continues to be—implicated in the production and maintenance of white supremacist structures of power. I thus approach the study of philosophy from a historical and material lens that takes the positionality of philosophers (as well as our positionality as readers) as fundamental for understanding the social and political stakes of philosophical arguments and texts. No matter the course, my pedagogy is grounded in anticolonial, antiracist, and anti-imperialist commitments that bring global and historically marginalized perspectives to bear upon philosophical texts and questions.
Courses Taught
Philosophies of Violence
What is violence—and who has the power to define it? This course traces how philosophers, theorists, and revolutionaries have grappled with the meaning, justification, and function of violence across political and historical contexts. From the classical problem of sovereign power to modern forms of warfare, colonial domination, biopolitical control, and revolutionary resistance, we will examine how violence has been imagined not just as destruction, but also as law-making, world-making, and system-preserving. Readings will include foundational texts by Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, and Michel Foucault, alongside critiques from Black, Indigenous, feminist, queer, and decolonial thinkers such as Achille Mbembe, Aimé Césaire, Saidiya Hartman, Audra Simpson, and Judith Butler. The aim of this course is to explore a plurality of robust analytic frameworks by which we might more holistically think through the multiple modalities of violence that define our present. No prior background in philosophy is required, but a willingness to engage complex, sometimes disturbing material is essential.
Honors Seminar: Foucault: Genealogy & Power
The French philosopher Michel Foucault is widely regarded as one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century, and his thought continues to influence scholarship across the humanities and social sciences. This honors seminar provides a comprehensive introduction to Foucault’s critical method of genealogy and its role in the development of his political thought. While we will spend the majority of the semester reading Foucault’s work, we will devote some attention to the thinkers and traditions of thought—those pioneered by Marx, Nietzsche, and the critical theorists—from which Foucault directly and indirectly drew inspiration. We will engage with these texts alongside Foucault’s own writings on knowledge, power, and subjectivity in order to better understand the centrality of genealogy in Foucault’s interrogation of the “history of the present.” In the final section of the course, we will focus our attention on contemporary scholars who have taken up, reimagined, and applied Foucault’s concepts and method to 21st-century questions of power, domination, and freedom.
Honors Seminar: Social & Political Philosophy
In the history of Western political thinking, the state has been the privileged object of philosophico-political analysis and practice, serving as both the theater of human sociality and the primary instrument of domination over man and nature. However, there is no unified conception of what, precisely, the state is or should be, nor whether the modern state truly is the best or most rational form of political organization. For whom does the state exist, and how is its power felt? Is the state simply that entity that claims the monopoly on the legitimate use of force, or does it function to structure and sustain relations of economic and social domination? How do we reconcile the liberal principles on which the modern state is founded with its violent participation in imperial colonialism and racial capitalism? Can we imagine ways of living in cooperation that exceed the state?
This honors seminar examines the philosophical and genealogical underpinnings of that entity we call the “state” by examining the foundational modern and contemporary theories of the state as a form of organized political power. The first few weeks of the semester will be dedicated to examining classical conceptions of the state from the canon of Western political theory. We will then turn our attention to antiracist, anticapitalist, feminist, and decolonial perspectives that offer critiques of and alternatives to the Western state-form.
Critical Philosophy of Race
In this course, we will examine key texts, themes, and arguments in the dynamic and evolving subfield known as “critical philosophy of race” (CPR). In response to both the limitations of abstract, ahistorical conceptualizations of “race” and “racism” and the urgent realities of racialized violence today, CPR foregrounds race as a lived, historically grounded, and socially constructed system of power. Proceeding from a historical and material lens, CPR departs from traditional philosophical treatments of race—which tend to focus narrowly on the conceptual legitimacy of race or consider the epistemological structure of racialized prejudice—by interrogating how race functions materially and structurally, shaping subjectivity, political institutions, and the production of knowledge itself. CPR takes as its targets of inquiry such phenomena as the social construction of race, the deployment of race in legitimating what author and activist bell hooks has called “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” and the historically unacknowledged place of race (and racism) in the philosophical canon.
Over the course of the semester, we will explore how CPR critically re-engages major philosophical traditions such as social contract theory, phenomenology, existentialism, psychoanalysis, and critical theory, while also pressing these traditions to address their historical exclusions of racial analysis. At the same time, we will attend to the specifically place-based dimensions of race: how colonial histories, forced migrations, and global capitalism differently racialize bodies and communities across various geographies. Drawing on thinkers such as Charles Mills, Aimé Césaire, Patrick Wolfe, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, this course will challenge us to engage deeply with both theoretical debates and real-world structures of domination and resistance. While the texts and discussions may be intellectually and emotionally demanding, we will approach them in a spirit of care, rigor, and shared responsibility—leaning into discomfort not as an endpoint, but as a starting point for critical reflection and collective learning.
Marx & Marxism
Few figures have inspired as much admiration and detestation-and even fewer have had as global a reception-as Karl Marx. Movements for justice and emancipation throughout the 20th century embraced Marxist ideals as alternatives to the hegemonic and totalizing logics of capitalism and liberalism that had (and has) kept the majority of the world’s population in chains, both literally and metaphorically. A study of Marx’s core insights-that the contradictions inherent in capitalism will lead to its (and perhaps our) eventual demise-remains critical if we are to interrogate the resurgence of white supremacist fascism, the logics of neocolonial exploitation, and the origins of the looming climate catastrophes that define our present moment. Over the course of the semester, we will explore some key texts from Marx’s philosophical, historical, economic, and political works. We will begin by closely reading what we might consider Marx’s most overtly “philosophical” writings—those which form the bases of his ideas of historical materialism, alienation, human nature. We will then turn to Marx’s understanding of the development of capitalism and his critique of political economy before concluding with Marx’s writings on the end of capitalism and the need for revolutionary praxis.
Social & Political Philosophy: Founding Philosophies
This course understandings “founding philosophies” in two senses. On the one hand, it refers to the texts that are said to constitute the canon of “Western civilization”: the philosophies of ancient Greece and Rome, the scholastic theology of Medieval Western Christendom, and the revolutionary thought of the Enlightenment era. On the other hand, it refers to those thinkers and texts that most inspired the radical vision of the American founders and which continue to shape conversations about what it means to be “American” today. To varying degrees, the thinkers in our syllabus explore the following questions: what is the purpose law? How should a state be organized? Who counts as a member of the political body? Importantly, our list of readings is populated by figures who have historically defined the “Western canon,” for which reason there is a stark lack of non-European and non-male thinkers in the syllabus. Our responsibility is to be cognizant of these omissions both by keeping in mind those whose voices are conspicuously absent and, more importantly, by appraising what these absences mean in the context of the texts themselves. The hope is that a close engagement with these writings and ideas will not only allow us to better understand the development of Western political thought, but also identify the deficiencies and gaps in the system that we have inherited so that we are better equipped to critique it.
First-Year Seminar: Aesthetics & Power
All human experiences—whether in the realm of culture, politics, knowledge-production, social relationships—are fundamentally aesthetic. The ancient Greek term aisthánomai (αἰσθᾰ́νομαι), from which our word “aesthetics” is derived, means “to perceive, sense, learn.” Beyond questions of beauty or taste, the aesthetic was understood by the ancient Greeks to be the foundation of all knowledge. While the philosophical discipline of aesthetics (which emerged in the eighteenth century) has traditionally confined itself to rationalist questions of beauty, judgment, and taste, we will understand “aesthetics” in this more expansive, material, and critical sense: as the experiential relationship between the self and the sensible. “Everyday social and material practices,” according to philosopher of art Monique Roelofs, “draw on aesthetic concepts.” Said differently, it is through aesthetic experience that we have access to and make sense of the world; it is what gives the world texture and meaning. And yet, the meaning we derive from aesthetic experience is in no way neutral, impartial, or spontaneous. The worlds into which we are born are already meaningful, and it is for this reason that the aesthetic is an especially robust site of power: it holds the capacity to reinforce and to disrupt the frameworks of meaning through which we experience and interpret the world. Insofar as aesthetic practices themselves construct social reality, in other words, they can also deconstruct it.
Taking this observation to heart, we will spend this first-year seminar critically engaging with a range of philosophical and aesthetic concepts that inform our social and material practices. In doing so, we will encounter writings from a number of subfields of philosophy, including critical theory, phenomenology, epistemology, philosophy of race, social and political philosophy, and queer and feminist theory. Scholars across these fields have recognized that our relationships with each other, our built and natural environments, and our larger human community are always aesthetically mediated. In order to bring these ideas to life, we will pair our texts with specific aesthetic and cultural objects that embody, reflect, reproduce, or challenge them, interrogating how philosophical ideas are manifested in and through the aesthetic. By pairing theory with aesthetic production and experience, we will explore firsthand how aesthetics function not only as expressions of individual creativity, but as forms of meaning-making that both shape our lived experiences and serve as powerful tools for critique and transformation.
For information on syllabi or course readings, please contact me.
Dr. Sabeen Ahmed 