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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2008

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Professor Isis Leslie is an interdisciplinary scholar who draws on film studies, history, and literature to examine questions of social justice. Some of her special interests include globalization, the intersections of racial politics and political theory, comparative political thought, human rights—their definition and abuses, and the relationships between psychoanalysis and politics.

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Association News
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 41 , Issue 4 , October 2008 , pp. 908
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 2008

Isis Leslie

Professor Isis Leslie is an interdisciplinary scholar who draws on film studies, history, and literature to examine questions of social justice. Some of her special interests include globalization, the intersections of racial politics and political theory, comparative political thought, human rights—their definition and abuses, and the relationships between psychoanalysis and politics.

Isis Leslie

An assistant professor at Texas Tech University, she is currently working on a book, The Vicissitudes of American Romanticism, that is a study of the nineteenth-century emergence of diverse, romantic conceptions of the self in the U.S. and the resistance African American intellectuals have historically presented to mainstream American romanticism. The project investigates the historical and contemporary consequences of American romanticism for American political culture, economic justice, and punishment.

During this time at the center she is at work on a chapter titled “Boredom: A Symptom of Romantic Selfhood.” Leslie argues that the nineteenth-century emergence of boredom as a widespread cultural phenomenon is a symptom of romantic selfhood that leaves many dissatisfied. Romanticism initially was a reaction against class hierarchy, religious, and social orthodoxy. But it was a reaction that does not provide the means to ethical, communal, or political well being. Rather romantic ideals promote individual isolation. In her work, Leslie examines the ethical theories of Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben for the insights their theories offer into social and political ethics beyond orthodoxy.

Leslie received her Ph.D. from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, in 2005. Before her time at Texas Tech she taught at Georgetown University, the George Washington University, and Rutgers University. She has also been a dissertation fellow at Northeastern University.

This is month-long stay is the second time Leslie has been able to make use of the Center. Her first stay was a six-month residency in 2006, funded by the Marguerite Ross Barnett Research Fund, while she was an assistant professor at George Washington University.