My research has long focussed on the ways in which language and politics intersect (and consequently on discourse theory and discourse analysis). More recently, my latest book Birth of the State. The Place of the Body in Crafting Modern Politics (OUP 2021) uses the body to peel back the layers of time and taken-for-granted ideas about the two defining political forms of modernity, the state and the subject of rights. It traces, under the lens of the body, how the state and the subject mutually constituted each other all the way down, by going all the way back, to their original crafting in the seventeenth century. It considers two revolutions. The first, scientific, threw humanity out of the centre of the universe, and transformed the very meanings of matter, space, and the body; while the second, legal and political, re-established humans as the centre-point of the framework of modern rights.
In my research at the Tokyo College I will develop a concept I touched upon in Birth of the State, the notion of ‘artifice’. I will undertake its genealogy in 17th century Europe and trace how it developed as a modern form of political agency that shaped our world — the same agency that all at once destroyed the environment (as conceived in the 20th century) and yielded to artificial intelligence.
French born in Kenya, I read Philosophy and French Literature at the Université de la Sorbonne, followed by an MPhil inInternational Relations at the University of Cambridge. I wrote my PhD at the University of Cambridge, and then was a George Lurcy visiting researcher University of California at Berkeley, after which I took up a teaching and research position at the University of Sydney. I have been a visiting researcher at the University of Copenhagen, a research director at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (HCAS) and at the Danish Institute of International Studies (DIIS).
I am the author of Birth of the State. The Place of the Body in Crafting Modern Politics (Oxford University Press, 2021) (see honours and awards) and of The Power of Words in International Relations: Birth of an Anti-whaling Discourse (MIT Press, 2008). My work has also been published in top-ranking journals across international relations, political theory and sociology that include: International Organization, the European Journal of International Relations, the Review of International Studies, Raison Politique, International Political Sociology, Body and Society, Millenium, International Theory, International Studies Perspective and Global Environmental Politics.
I am the recipient of the 2023 International Studies Association’s Best Book in the discipline award, as well as the 2023 Yale Ferguson (recognising the best book in historical research), both for my latest book Birth of the State. The Place of the Body in Crafting Modern Politics (Oxford University Press 2021).My first book, The Power of Words in International Relations was the runner-up to the ISA’s 2009 Margaret Sprout Award (recognising the best book in environmental politics). I received the University of Sydney’s 2019 Teaching Award.
