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
“Excessive Attachments: Racial Capitalism and the Failure of the Left in the Age of Neoliberalism,” Critical International Review of Social and Political Philosophy (Forthcoming 2026).
“The Asceticism of the Oppressed: Anticolonial Ethics and the Politics of Collective Self-Transformation” (Co-authored with Dimitri M’Bama). Political Theory, (2026). (Available here)
“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.