News on former fellows
Former Fellows who have informed us of changes in their academic activities: Gordon Arlen, Peter Giraudo, Nojang Khatami, Hannah McHugh, Cain Shelley, and Carlotta Voß.

Gordon Arlen is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Swarthmore College in the United States. He spent the summer of 2024 as an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Hamburg, with sponsorship from Professor of Political Theory Peter Niesen. There, he continued work on his upcoming book manuscript, which focuses on the oligarchic threat to democracy.

Peter Giraudo will be a Core Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor in Political Science at Boston College in 2024/2025. He will be part of the Core Curriculum teaching team and will be teaching courses on theories of democracy as well as the history of economic thought. At Boston College, Peter will also continue to conduct research on his book project Political Trade Unionism: Industrial Cooperation and the Construction of the Class Struggle in Fin-de-Siècle Europe. In the summer of 2025, he will be a visiting fellow at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (IWM) in Vienna.

Nojang Khatami has been an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Fordham University's Lincoln Center Campus in NYC since September 2023, teaching Political Philosophy, Revolution, Islam, Art, and Resistance. His research focuses on comparative political thought and democratic theory, as well as literature and aesthetics. Since arriving at Fordham, he has also been involved in growing the Islamic Studies program, serving as co-coordinator and program mentor for the minor in this field. In the 2024/25 academic year, he will be teaching new courses on Contemporary Politics in the Islamic World and Decolonial Political Thought in Latin America, and present his research in these areas at the Association for Political Theory and American Political Science Association annual conferences.

Hannah McHugh will be a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ethics Institute of Utrecht University for the next three years. She will be contributing to Professor Ingrid Robeyn’s project »Visions of the Future«. The project begins from the recognition that neo-liberal socio-economic systems are confronted with several problems, ranging from ecological unsustainability to increasing inequality. In reaction to these crises several alternative visions for the future have been formulated, such as the doughnut-economy, the wellbeing-economy, the economy for the common good, and basis income society. However, it remains unclear how to make a systematic comparison and evaluation of these visions. The »Visions of the Future« project makes a comparative normative analysis of these proposed visions, will develop a framework to conduct this analysis, and finally will search for hybrid or new visions fit to respond to the challenges faced.

Cain Shelley is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick. He is planning to write a book which develops a normative theory of political organizing. Therein, he wants to offer a philosophical taxonomy of leading approaches to community and trade union organizing, and ask various evaluative and deontological questions about this form of political activism. These questions include: what kinds of political organizing might be particularly valuable, and why? What valuable dispositions of character or virtues do good organizers need to possess? What kinds of duties or obligations might organizers have to their fellow activists and those whom they attempt to organize? Might it be the case that citizens can sometimes be under a duty to become organizers?

Carlotta Voß is a lecturer in the Department of Political Theory and History of Ideas at the University of Bonn and has recently written on theories of intergenerational justice (and on the history of ideas of the concept of generations). In 2024, her book Ironie und Urteil: ironische Historiographie und die Entdeckung des Politischen bei Thukydides was published by Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht in Goettingen. She currently also works as a speechwriter in federal politics in Berlin.