My first book project, What Violence Was, focuses on the history of recent American debates about how the term “violence” should be defined in political theory and deployed in political rhetoric.

How do we draw the line between violence and nonviolence? Where do terms like “structural violence” come from? Why does so much contemporary activist and academic debate about violence focus on language as a space of power and harm? These are the sorts of questions that my project examines.

The book manuscript is complete and now under review at a university press.

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Two of my journal articles are thematically connected to this project. “Between Mediation and Critique: Quaker Nonviolence in Apartheid Cape Town, 1976–1990” (European Journal of Political Theory, 2020) follows parallel questions in a different historical and geographical context. “Silence is violence, and so is speech” (New Political Science, 2022) outlines part of the book’s argument about the politics of language.