Adam Dahl

My research and teaching interests are in American political thought, democratic theory, the politics of race and indigeneity, and political theories of empire and colonialism.  My first book, Empire of the People: Settler Colonialism and the Foundations of Modern Democratic Thought (University Press of Kansas, 2018), examines the constitutive role of settler colonialism in shaping modern norms of democratic legitimacy.  I am currently working on two book-length projects.  The first provides an intellectual genealogy of W.E.B. Du Bois’s notion of “world democracy” in the context of transnational democratic thought in the twentieth century.  The second, tentatively titled “Semisovereign Peoples,” examines narrative and rhetorical articulations of transnational citizenship in the work of Ottobah Cugoano, Frederick Douglass, Randolph Bourne, Herman Melville, and C.L.R. James.  I also work on the history and philosophy of abolitionism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  My research has appeared or is forthcoming in journals like Polity, Perspectives on Politics, Contemporary Political Theory, Journal of Politics, Constellations, Modern Intellectual History, and Political Research Quarterly, among others, and has received financial support from the Mellon Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies, the W.E.B. Du Bois Center, and the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies (CLACLS).  Before coming to UMass, I taught at the University of Minnesota and the University of the South.

Fellow, Mellon Grant to develop graduate certificate for Decolonial Global Studies (2022-2024)

Faculty Research Grant / Healy Endowment Grant (2021-2022)

SBS Faculty Grant (2021-2022)

Fellowship, "Race and Representation," Institution for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies (2020-2021)

Fellowship, Crossroads in the Study of the Americas (CISA), Five College Consortium (2019-2020)

TIDE Fellowship (Teaching for Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity), Center for Teaching Excellence and Faculty Development (2019-2020)

Summer Research Fellowship, W.E.B. Du Bois Center (2019)

Visioning Grant (w/ Angelica Bernal), Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies (2018)

Dissertation Completion Fellowship, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and American Council of Learned Societies (2013-2014)

Empire of the People: Settler Colonialism and the Foundations of Modern Democratic Thought (University Press of Kansas, 2018).

"Constructing Colonial Peoples: W.E.B. Du Bois, the United Nations, and the Politics of Space and Scale," Modern Intellectual History, Forthcoming

"Beyond the Anglo-World: Settler Colonialism and Democracy in the Americas," Polity, Forthcoming

"Unusual Returns: Transnational Whiteness and the Dividends of Empire," Constellations, Forthcoming

“Self-Determination Between World and Nation,” Symposium on Adom Getachew’s Worldmaking After Empire, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 40 (December 2020)

“Oppression and Racial Slavery: Abolitionist Challenges to Neo-Republicanism,” Contemporary Political Theory, 20 (June 2021)

"Creolizing Natural Liberty: Transnational Obligation in the Thought of Ottobah Cugoano," Journal of Politics, 82 (July 2020)

“Narrating Historical Injustice:  Political Responsibility and the Politics of Memory” (w/ David  Temin), Political Research Quarterly, 70 (December 2017).

“The Black American Jacobins:  Revolution, Radical Abolition, and the Transnational Turn,” Perspectives on Politics, 15 (September 2017).

“Black Disembodiment in the Age of Ferguson,” New Political Science, 39 (September 2017).

“Commercial Conquest:  Empire and Property in the Early U.S. Republic,” American Political Thought, 5 (Summer 2016).

“Nullifying Settler Democracy:  William Apess and the Paradox of Settler Sovereignty,” Polity, 48 (April 2016).

“Neoliberalism for the Common Good?  Public Value Governance and the Downsizing of Democracy” (w/ Joe Soss), Public Administration Review, 74 (July 2014)

POLISCI 203: American Political Thought

POLISCI 272: Democracy and Citizenship

POLISCI 392: Black Political Thought

POLISCI 791: Comparative Political Theory: Race, Civilization, and Empire (graduate seminar)

POLISCI 797: The Politics of Decolonization (graduate seminar)

POLISCI 797L: Interpretation (graduate seminar)

POLISCI 797RE: Race, Empire, and the Struggle for American Democracy (graduate seminar)