Boris Litvin
Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science
Boris's work investigates how modern political thinkers thematize spectators and spectatorship in their conceptions of "the people," in turn connecting these discussions to authors' efforts to engage their own audiences in new ways.
- PhD, Northwestern University, 2019
BA, University of Michigan, 2011 - BA, Political Science, Furman University, 2003
Biography
Boris Litvin received a PhD in Political Science from Northwestern University in 2019. His research extends across modern political thought, focusing especially on the relationship between rhetoric and democratic theory. Specifically, Boris's work investigates how modern political thinkers thematize spectators and spectatorship in their conceptions of "the people," in turn connecting these discussions to authors' efforts to engage their own audiences in new ways. Boris's book manuscript, You the People: Political Theory and the Construction of Popular Audiences, locates these engagements in the theoretic and literary works of Niccolo' Machiavelli, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Hannah Arendt.
Boris's scholarly publications have appeared in the European Journal of Political Theory and the Review of Politics, and his commentary connecting political theory to contemporary political events has appeared in the New Statesman. Boris mainly teaches courses in political theory and political philosophy.
More About Boris Litvin
Areas of Expertise
- Political Theory
Course Sampling
- Introduction to Political Philosophy
- Ancient Political Thought
- Modern Political Thought
- American National Government
- Senior Research
- "Staging Emile: Audience and Genre in Collective Self-Legislation," The Review of Politics 81.3 (Summer 2019).
- "Mapping rule and subversion: Perspective and the democratic turn in Machiavelli scholarship," The European Journal of Political Theory 18.1 (January 2019).
- "Authoring Machiavelli: Barbara Salutati, La Mandragola, and the Performance of Political Theory," in The Wives of Western Philosophy: Gender Politics in Intellectual Labor, edited by Jennifer Forestal and Menaka Philips (Routledge, Forthcoming 2020).
- "What Jean-Jacques Rousseau can teach us about Twitter," New Statesman (20 January 2020).