Dissertation Research

My current research project proposes a political theory of resentment. In recent years, resentment seems to be everywhere. From debates around inequality, race, and the far right, the term has become shorthand for an ‘unhealthy’ form of politics. Most existing scholarship treats this emotion as corrosive, yet few have sought to understand resentment itself. In my dissertation, “The Unhappy Poor: A Political Theory of Resentment,” I offer a history of the idea of resentment, engaging with a wide range of thinkers from Aristotle to Frantz Fanon. Exploring this emotion through three political traditions – democracy, socialism, and anticolonialism – I argue that resentment has a strong moral, conceptual, and practical valence. It allows us to perceive something that otherwise goes unnoticed: politics happens when we feel that something is wrong.

This intervention is especially urgent for our polarized times. A political theory of resentment allows us to rethink how politics takes shape in fragmented societies marked by highly visible inequalities in wealth and power. It shows that political subjectivity can be found not only in places of rational understanding, but in the everyday experience of injustice. If we misunderstand resentment – that is, if we remain committed to pathologizing it – we surrender its potential to transform the world around us, a potential that even Friedrich Nietzsche, resentment’s harshest critic, could not ignore. My work, therefore, challenges approaches to political science that marginalize the role of emotions, particularly those feelings that Sianne Ngai has described as “ugly.” By bringing affect theory into conversation with the history of political thought and contemporary debates on populism, I develop a distinctly emotional vocabulary for political renewal. I contend that we must learn to speak the language of resentment – unrefined at times, yet capable of articulating a demand for a more just world.