Faculty

Jason Frank is the Government Department’s Gary S. Davis Assistant Professor in the History of Political Thought. He received his MA and Ph.D. in political science from the Johns Hopkins University, and a BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Before coming to Cornell, Jason taught at Johns Hopkins, Goucher College, University of California, Santa Cruz, Duke and Northwestern. He has also held research fellowships at UCLA’s Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies, Duke’s Franklin Institute for Interdisciplinary Research, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His primary field is political theory and his research and teaching interests include democratic theory, American political thought, politics and literature, political culture, and the philosophy of political inquiry.

Jason works on historically situated approaches to democratic theory, with an emphasis on early American political thought and culture. His recent research explores the legal and political dilemmas engendered by the American Revolution’s enthronement of “the people” as the legitimate ground of public authority. He is interested in the forms of political contestation that emerge around competing claims to speak in the people’s name, particularly those he calls “constituent moments”. Jason defines these as moments when claims to speak in the people’s name are politically felicitous, even though they break from established rules and procedures for representing popular voice. His research explores the dilemmas of authorization that spring from these moments as they appear in both the formal political settings of constitutional conventions and political associations, as well as in the relatively informal political contexts of crowd actions, political oratory, and literature.

Jason has recently finished a book on these themes titled Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America (Duke University Press, forthcoming) and he is currently working on a new book titled Publius and Political Imagination (Rowman & Littlefield, forthcoming). He is the co-editor of Vocations of Political Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 2000) and of a special double issue of the journal Diacritics 37:2-3 (“Taking Exception to the Exception”). Jason’s articles and reviews have appeared in such journals as Political Theory, Modern Intellectual History, Theory & Event, Public Culture, Constellations, Perspectives on Politics, and The Review of Politics.

Jason teaches seminars on democratic theory (Government 664), American political thought (Government 458 / 658), language and politics (Government 677), passion and politics (Government 400.4), and political theory and the problem of modernity (Government 662). He also teaches a first-year writing seminar (“Political Theory and the American Founding”) and a lecture course on politics and literature (Government 3655). In spring 2009 he and Isaac Kramnick co-taught a political theory graduate seminar on the Enlightenment (Government 6075), and in spring 2010 Jason will teach a new lecture course on political freedom.

Jason is the organizer of the Department’s Political Theory Workshop.

Courses Taught

Govt 664

Govt 458/658

Govt 677

Govt 400.4

Govt 662

Govt 3655

Govt 6975