Publications
Book (in progress)
The City and Self-Transformation: Michel Foucault and the Politics of Asceticism
Dissertation
Powers of Practice: Michel Foucault and the Politics of Asceticism
(Available here | Recipient of the APSA Leo Strauss Award)
Peer-reviewed journal articles
“The Asceticism of the Oppressed: Anticolonial Ethics and the Politics of Collective Self-Transformation” (Co-authored with Dimitri M’Bama). Political Theory (Forthcoming, 2026).
“Excessive Attachments: Racial Capitalism and the Failure of the Left in the Age of Neoliberalism,” Critical International Review of Social and Political Philosophy (Forthcoming 2025).
“Practice or Product? Labour, Training, and the Ethics of AI.” Global Labour Journal, 16(2) (May 2025), 125-140. (Available here)
“Training the Philosopher King: Ancient Models of Political Action in Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault.” Journal of the Philosophy of History, 18(3) (November 2024), 365-391. (Available here)
“Between Authority and Care: Plato’s Crito as Defense of the Philosophical Life.” Dionysius, 39 (July 2024), 97-129. (Available here)
“On the Ownership of the Means of Training: Domination, Asceticism, and Capacities of Resistance.” Theory & Event, 26(4) (October 2023), 701-726. (Available here)
Peer-reviewed book chapters
“The Aristotelean Ethic and the Spirit of Neoliberalism: Askesis and Capitalism Today,” in Mythogenesis, Interdiscursivity, Ritual. Ed. Burkhard Fehr and Panagiotis Roilos (Leiden/Boston: Brill, August 2024), 430-456. (Available here)
“Graffiti Walls: Arts-Based Mental Health Knowledge Translation with Young People in Secondary Schools,” in Creative Approaches to Health Education: New Ways of Thinking, Making, Doing, Teaching and Learning. Ed. Deborah Lupton and Deana Leahy. London: Routledge, 2021. (With Katherine Boydell et al.). (Available here)
Translations, reviews, essays
“Simone Weil’s ‘Rationalisation’: Translated from French & Annotated,” Global Labour Journal, 15(1) (January 2024), 64-74. (Available here)
“Human Being, Working Body, Working Day,” Global Labour Journal, 15(1) (January 2024), 58-63. (Available here)
“(Review of) Mark Coeckelbergh, Self-Improvement: Technologies of the Soul in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.” Journal of Foucault Studies, No. 34 (2023): 52-56. (Available here)
“(Review of) Niki Kasumi Clements, Sites of the Ascetic Self: John Cassian and Christian Ethical Formation.” Journal of Foucault Studies, No. 32 (2022): 388-391. (Available here)
Please email me if you would like a PDF of any of the above for personal research use
Working papers/projects
I currently have works in progress on the following themes:
“Asceticism in Indian Anticolonial Activism: Charisma, Capacity, Gender” (Article in progress; first version presented APSA 2025)
Lettres d’un ascète [Ascetic Epistles: Letters 1-100 of Isidore of Pelusium], first modern-language translation of the Ancient Greek (with Christian Raschle; In progress, anticipated completion of manuscript May 2026)
These works serve as first studies towards a second book project that is tentatively entitled: A Comparative History of Political Asceticisms.
Research program
Generally, my research asks the question: Can transforming the self transform the world? I answer yes, but only if we think of self-transformation – or ‘askesis’ – as something more than an isolated, individual project whose political import, if it has one, starts and ends with the hope that many individual self-transformations will amount to a broader world-transformation.
I aim to develop a sufficiently nuanced theory of what self-transformation has entailed and could entail in its political valences. Properly understood, effective asceticism is always a collective undertaking in constant dialectical relation with broad economic and political structures/strategies and local, concrete institutions.
The title that I give to my general research agenda is “global political asceticisms.” I undertake the global, contextual, and comparative study of organized systems for the training and modification of bodily and mental capacities. Most recently, I have been exploring Gandhi’s ascetic activism and the ashram as an “ascetic technology” for the generation of anticolonial and anticapitalist political agency.