Publications

From French lit to biotech regulation…

Inevitably when people find out I started a PhD in French literature before switching to political science, I hear: “You were a lit major? How’d you end up here?” In my mind, the route from French to political science is actually very clear! But sometimes I come across an article that helps me explain it better. Carl Zimmer reported in The New York Times last week on how the “Editing of Pig DNA May Lead to More Organs for People.” Zimmer writes about a new method for editing genes, called Crispr, that presents the possibility of altering pig DNA in a way that would allow doctors to successfully transplant pig organs into humans. Andrew Pollack has discussed Crispr and its…

Biopolitics & Utopia: An Interdisciplinary Reader

It’s finally here! I’m very excited to announce that my most recent edited collection, Biopolitics and Utopia: An Interdisciplinary Reader, is now out from Palgrave Macmillan. Andrew Byers, a visiting assistant professor in History at Duke University, and I worked hard on bringing together an excellent group of contributors from the US, Canada, Malaysia, and Australia. The project grew out of a panel Andrew and I put together for the Society for Utopian Studies Conference in 2013. The focus of the panel was “Biopolitics and Utopian/Dystopian Politics”. For readers looking to understand what we mean by “biopolitics”, we think of the concept as the strategies pursued and the actions taken by the state to control its citizens at the “level…