I teach social theory and the history and philosophy of science in the Literature Program at Duke. My scholarship focuses on critical genealogies of the human and the social sciences, in an effort to draw out the underlying ethical, political, and theoretical ramifications of scientific thought.

My first book, Madness and Enterprise (University of Chicago Press), explores the intertwined histories of psychiatry and economic thought in order to consider how the very notion of madness has been transmuted into an economic form of its own (what I dub “pathological value”). The book presents an archeology of North Atlantic psychiatric discourse at the turn of the century, one that reveals how economic styles of reasoning, and the very logic of capitalism, have saturated and indeed fashioned our modern conceptions of mental pathology.

I’m in the process of developing two new book projects that collectively examine the complex relationship between modern science and democratic politics. The first project is tentatively titled Who’s Afraid of Science? Intended for a broad audience, this book is a somewhat polemical effort to reframe science skepticism by asking whether the rejection of scientific authority is truly the hallmark of unreasonableness. The second project, tentatively titled Science as Political Form, is a more technical and theoretical exploration of the relationship between scientific authority and political reason. One of the central aims of this book is to reconsider the contemporary commonplace that science is integral to a well-functioning democracy. But what sort of democracy does science actually facilitate? And is this the kind of democracy we need today?

In addition to teaching in the Program in Literature, I am also the Director of the Jameson Institute for Critical Theory. Founded in 2004 by Fredric Jameson, and renamed in his honor in 2025, the Jameson institute has served as a premier hub for critical theory at Duke for more than twenty years.