Jennifer M. Hudson

I am currently the Program Manager and Academic Adviser at the Washington University Prison Education Project, Associate Fellow at the Interdisciplinary Project for the Humanities, and a member of the political theory faculty at Wash U.  I have a PhD in Political Science (political theory, international relations minor) from Columbia University (defense Sept. 2015), where I was advised by Nadia Urbinati, Jean Cohen, and Samuel Moyn, with strong support from Turkuler Isiksel and Steven Lukes.

In my doctoral thesis, The Bureaucratic Mentality in Democratic Theory and Contemporary Democracy, I interrogate contemporary democratic projects that blend the logics of bureaucracy and democracy.  In their effort to adapt democratic institutions to a new world context and generate legitimacy in the face of the “crisis of representation,” democratic theorists must incorporate the history of tension between these two practices, principles, and ways of thinking, in addition to the history of affinity that is currently being recovered.  My research interests include democratic theory, European politics, modern and contemporary European political thought, the history of political ideas, and social theory.

I arrived at Wash U after teaching for three years in social studies at the Bard Prison Initiative and Bard College, as well as serving as Associate Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities.  Before beginning graduate work at Columbia, I was a Fulbright scholar at the Albert Ludwigs Universität in Freiburg, Germany.   I graduated from L’Institut d’études politiques de Paris (Sciences Po Paris) with master’s degrees in both political theory and international and European affairs and from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with a B.A. in political science.