I am the Edna and Richard Salomon Distinguished Professor of​ Political Science and Associate Director of the ​Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Brown University. 

     My research and teaching interests include democratic theory, the history of American and African-American political philosophy, and pragmatism. Some of the thinkers that shape my thinking include David Walker, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, John Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Richard Rorty, and Cornel West. 

     I am the author of ​The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought (Princeton University Press, 2023), The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy (2008), editor of John Dewey, ​The Public and Its Problems (2016), and co-editor with Jack Turner of African American Political Thought: A Collected History (University of Chicago Press, 2021).

     With Christia Mercer, I am also the co-editor of a book series, Oxford's New Histories of Philosophy. 

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Brown University Research Page

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