Claire Sagan

Claire Sagan joined the faculty in 2018 after a two-year Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University (2016-2018) and spending one year as Visiting Assistant Professor at Florida International University (2015-2016). She received her PhD in Political Science along with a Graduate Certificate in Advanced Feminist Studies from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in September 2015.

Her research and teaching focus on Feminist and Environmental Political Theory. Sagan is currently finishing her first book, titled Beyond Utopia. In it she argues that at various timescales from the quotidian to the macro-economic and planetary deep time, capitalist temporalities (conceptions and experiences of time) both are disconnected from ecological time and fetishize an ideal time that will never come, thus affecting our concrete pasts, presents and futures in destructive ways – she calls this timescape “uchronia.”

Her next project will take on the concept of eternal return in Nietzsche’s thought to think about our context of mass extinctions. She is also working on the overlap of environmental justice and Celtic autonomist movements in Brittany, France, where she is from, and where she lived until her PhD.

She usually teaches courses in Feminist Science and Technology Studies, Political Theory and Gender Studies, including “Gender, Science and Politics,” “Feminist Thoughts for a Heated Climate,” “Environmental Political Thought,” and “Feminist Political Thought: Sex, Gender, Matter.”