I am a social theorist, historian & philosopher of the human sciences, and assistant professor at Duke University, where I teach in the Program in Literature, Duke’s interdisciplinary humanities and cultural studies program. I am also the co-director of Duke’s Institute for Critical Theory, where I convene the Critical Theory Workshop.

My first book, Madness and Enterprise (University of Chicago Press), explores how turn-of-the century psychiatrists across Europe and North America deployed an economic style of reasoning to resolve ambiguities with respect to status of mental health. In so doing, they inadvertently altered a longstanding equivalence between mental health and economic prosperity, by suggesting that in many cases mental pathologies were compatible with remunerative economic conduct and that sometimes a degree of madness was actually essential for financial success. The very category of madness, I argue, was transformed into an economic form, and consequently evaluated on the basis of its economic prospects, rather than simply on its medical or moral merits.

I am currently writing my second book, tentatively titled The Truth that Binds: Science, Theory, & Democracy. The Truth that Binds is a critical examination of the entanglements between science and liberal democracy. Centered on the United States over the past five decades, the book is a largely theoretical intervention intended for a broad audience. It focuses on the complex nature of scientific governance – that is, how our normative social-political behaviors and attitudes have come to be organized and orchestrated in relation to science’s epistemic, moral, and veridical authority. A guiding question is: What is our relationship to scientific authority today?  In other words, what is at stake in the tacit obligations of scientific adherence, in the demand that we comply with the veridical authority of institutional science? The book considers this question through an analysis of the various oppositions to scientific governance which have become a source of consternation within the contemporary liberal imaginary. Such oppositions include not only the diverse forms of scientific skepticism emergent since the 1960s but also certain expressions of critical theory within the humanities and qualitative social sciences that have come to be regarded by scholars and public intellectuals alike as fueling a relativist and anti-scientific worldview. What precisely does it mean to reject scientific truth claims? And why do apparent revolts against science’s authority (in all their alleged forms) come to be viewed as threats to the stability of liberal democracy itself?

Before arriving at Duke, I was an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University, an ACLS New Faculty Fellow at Duke, and Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago, where I was affiliated faculty in History and the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science. I received my PhD in the Rhetoric program at the University of California, Berkeley.