My name is Quinn Lester, and I am currently a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the University Writing Program at Johns Hopkins University. I received a Ph.D. in Political Science in August 2022 from Johns Hopkins University, where I studied Political Theory and American Politics. Since then I have also taught courses in Political Theory, Racial and Ethnic Politics, and Criminal Justice at Washington & Lee University and George Washington University as Visiting Assistant Professor. My research specializes in democratic theory and political violence. I am particularly interested in how historical and contemporary African American social movement critiques of policing reveal the constitutive role of political violence in defining what forms of American democracy matter and for whom, particularly under the framework of abolition democracy. My solo-authored, peer-reviewed writing has been published at Constellations, Politics, Groups, and Identities, New Political Science, Social Science Quarterly, and Catalyst.
My syllabi can be found at quinnlester.com
2024 “Democratic Rioting: Tocqueville’s Tyranny of the Majority to the Baltimore Uprising”, Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory
2022 “Detecting the Asian Cop: Policing and the Incorporation of Asian Americans into American Empire”, Politics, Groups, and Identities
“Bound to Preserve the White Self: Speculative Frenzy and the Patriarchal Right to Self- Defense in John Locke and Ida B. Wells”, New Political Science
2021 “Whose Democracy in Which State: Abolition Democracy from Angela Davis to W. E. B. Du Bois”, Social Science Quarterly
“Bio-Orientalism and The Yellow Peril of Yellow Life”, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience
Political Theory, American Politics, Democratic Theory, Police Studies, Carceral Studies
- American Political Science Association
- Association for Political Theory
- Western Political Science Association