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Hello

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Welcome to my website!  I am a Visiting Assistant Professor of Politics at Whitman College, and I previously taught as an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Law & Policy Studies at Dickinson College.  At Dickinson, I was also the co-director of the Dialogues Across Differences project, a curricular and community initiative that was funded by a $300,000 grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.  

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My broader research and teaching interests are in normative and critical political theory, public law, and constitutional jurisprudence, and I have particular expertise in the history of political thought, nineteenth and twentieth century continental theory, critical legal studies, and rights-based jurisprudence.

 

As an interdisciplinary teacher-scholar, I interrogate the gap between ideals like justice, fairness, and equality, and the lived experiences of exclusion, subordination, and dispossession.  I attend, in particular, to how this gap shapes the formation of political, legal, and social identities in late liberal democratic states.   My research traces the affect of this gap across sites of incarceration and punishment, citizenship and belonging, and religious and cultural pluralism, and it does so through considerations of political genealogies, archival ephemera, first person narratives, and the artifacts of law, like depositions, trial transcripts, opinions, and more.

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I earned my Ph.D. in Jurisprudence and Social Policy, with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, from the University of California at Berkeley.  I also hold a M.Sc. (with distinction) in Ideas and Identities from the London School of Economics, and a B.A. (with Latin and departmental honors) in Politics and German Studies from Whitman College. ​​​​

Phone

509.527.5889

Email

heardk2 (at) whitman (dot) edu

© 2035 By Kathryn Heard

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