Newly appointed visitors will join returning scholars Joseph Chan, Global Scholar and Visiting Professor (Fall '22) and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor for Distinguished Teaching (Spring ‘23 & ‘24) for the upcoming academic year.

Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellows, 2022-2023

Farrah Ahmed, Melbourne Law School

Farrah Ahmed is a professor at Melbourne Law School. Before this, she was a Lecturer in Law at The Queen's College, University of Oxford. Her research spans constitutional and administrative law, legal theory and family law. She is currently working on a theory of secularism. Her work, including on judicial review, constitutional statutes, religious freedom and social rights, has been published in the Cambridge Law Journal, the Modern Law Review, the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies and Public Law. Her book “Religious Freedom Under the Personal Law System” was published by Oxford University Press in 2016. 

Elvira Basevich, University of California, Davis

Elvira Basevich is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, Davis. She works in social and political philosophy, modern European philosophy, and Africana philosophy. She also has research interests in feminist philosophy and philosophy of race. She is the author of “W.E.B. Du Bois: The Lost and the Found,” published in 2020 with Polity Press, as well as essays that have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Journal of Moral Philosophy, Critical Philosophy of Race, Journal of Political Philosophy, Social Theory & Practice, Philosophical Topics, and The Philosophical Forum. At Princeton, she will be writing her next book, “A Boisian Theory of Justice: On Political Constructivism, Democratic Development, and Reform,” which examines Du Bois's critique of 19th- and 20th-century American democracy to explain and showcase why democracy can yield justice. 

Desmond Jagmohan, University of California, Berkeley

Desmond Jagmohan is an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. He works on African American and American political thought, with a focus on moral and political agency under conditions of extremity such as slavery and Jim Crow. He also has interests in the relationship between property and self-determination in African American and Native American political thought. Desmond is completing his first book, “Dark Virtues: Booker T. Washington’s Tragic Realism” (under contract with Princeton University Press), which studies the moral and expressive costs of Booker T. Washington’s politics of deception. Desmond has also published on the political thought of Charles Mills, Marcus Garvey, Harriet Jacobs, Martin Delany, and Charles Eastman. At UCHV, he will be working on his second book, “Slavery & Subversion: The Political Thought of Harriet Jacobs.” He is looking forward to his time with the Center’s extraordinary community. 

Stuart Middleton, University of Warwick 

Stuart Middleton is an assistant professor of history and literature at the University of Warwick, UK, where he directs the undergraduate program in history and literature. He completed his undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of Cambridge and was a Fulbright Scholar at New York University in 2017-18. Stuart works on the development of political and intellectual cultures in Britain, Europe and North America since the late nineteenth century, with a particular focus on literature and political thought. His previous work has included a study of detective fiction, essays on the political thought of the early New Left in Britain, and the first installments of a new intellectual history of the welfare state. At Princeton he will be completing a monograph for Cambridge University Press entitled “The Paradox of Democracy,” which explores ideas of democratic crisis in Britain and America between the First World War and the Cold War.

Sarah Milov, University of Virginia

Sarah Milov is an associate professor of history at the University of Virginia. She is the author of “The Cigarette: A Political History” (Harvard: 2019), winner of the 2020 PROSE Award for North American History and the Willie Lee Rose Prize from the Southern Association for Women Historians for the best book on any topic in southern history. Her research focuses on the intersection of political, legal, and social history in modern America, and interrogates practices of ethical resistance, dissent, and knowledge-making within bureaucracies. At Princeton, she will be working on a book manuscript on the history of whistleblowing as a gendered and racialized form of claims making, with implications for corporate and democratic accountability.

Briana Toole, Claremont McKenna College 

Briana Toole is an assistant professor of philosophy at Claremont McKenna College. Her research interests are in epistemology, philosophy of race and gender, and social and political philosophy. Briana’s research investigates the role of traditional assumptions regarding knowledge production in reproducing oppression. For the past few years, she has been working to motivate and revitalize a thesis consigned to the margins of philosophy, standpoint epistemology, the view that non-epistemic features (like one’s social identity) make a difference to what one is in a position to know. Her work has appeared in Hypatia, Episteme, and Analysis, and she has also been featured on popular podcasts Examining Ethics and The Unmute Podcast. She is the founder and director of Corrupt the Youth, a program that brings philosophy to high school-aged populations that have been historically excluded from the academy. While at Princeton, she will be working on a project that examines the standards - like civility - to which social and political resistance is held, and the extent to which such standards compromise the radical spirit of resistance. 

Desiree Valentine, Marquette University 

Desiree Valentine is an assistant professor of philosophy at Marquette University. She was awarded a dual-title Ph.D. in philosophy and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies in 2018 from The Pennsylvania State University. In 2021, she was the recipient of a Career Enhancement Fellowship from The Institute for Citizens and Scholars. Her research areas include critical philosophy of race, feminist philosophy, critical disability theory, and bioethics. In her work, Valentine examines how the sociopolitical co-constitution of race and disability operates in a variety of arenas such as law, healthcare, and reproduction. As an LSR Fellow, she will complete a series of articles on the relationship between processes of racialization and disablement. You can find her work in Critical Philosophy of Race, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Journal of Philosophy of Disability, Bioethics, and Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology.

Leif Wenar, Stanford University

Leif Wenar is the Olive H. Palmer Professor in Humanities, professor of philosophy and, by courtesy, professor of political science and Professor of Law Senior Fellow, Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University. After receiving his A.B. in philosophy at Stanford, Leif Wenar earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard, then worked in Britain, and returned to Stanford in 2020. He is the author of “Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence, and the Rules that Run the World” and the author-meets-critics volume “Beyond Blood Oil: Philosophy, Policy, and the Future.” He is also the author of the entries ‘John Rawls’ and ‘Rights’ in “The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.” His articles have appeared in Mind, Analysis, Philosophy & Public Affairs, Ethics, The Journal of Political Philosophy, The Columbia Law Review, and The Philosopher’s Annual. He co-edited an autobiographical volume on the economist F.A. Hayek, as well as “Giving Well: The Ethics of Philanthropy.” He has been a Laurance S. Rockefeller Fellow (2000-2001) and a Visiting Professor at Princeton’s University Center for Human Values, a Visiting Professor at the Princeton Department of Politics, a Visiting Professor at the Stanford Center on Ethics and Society, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, the William H. Bonsall Visiting Professor in the Stanford Philosophy Department, a Fellow of the Program on Justice and the World Economy at the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Ethics and Public Affairs at The Murphy Institute of Political Economy, and a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University School of Philosophy. His public writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs, and the playbill for the White Light Festival at Lincoln Center. In London, he served for several years on the Mayor’s Policing Ethics Panel, which advises the Mayor and the Metropolitan Police on issues such as digital surveillance and the use of force. He is currently developing unity theory, a new theory of what makes for more valuable lives, relationships, and societies. His work can be found at wenar.info. 

Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Associate Professor for Distinguished Teaching, 2022-2023

Alison McQueen, Stanford University

Alison McQueen is an associate professor in the departments of political science and history, by courtesy, at Stanford University. Her research focuses on early modern political theory and the history of international relations thought.  Her book, “Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times” (Cambridge University Press, 2018), traces the responses of three canonical political realists—Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and Hans Morgenthau—to hopes and fears about the end of the world. A second book project, “Absolving God: Hobbes’s Scriptural Politics,” tracks and explains changes in Thomas Hobbes’s strategies of Scriptural argument over time.  Her other ongoing research projects explore treason and betrayal in the history of political thought, the ethics and politics of catastrophe, and digital tools for tracking conceptual change.