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Faculty Fellow, 2026 – 2027

Daragh Grant

Associate Senior Instructional Professor, Social Sciences Collegiate Division University of Chicago

Biography

Daragh Grant is an Associate Senior Instructional Professor in the College at the University of Chicago. His intellectual interests include the history of colonialism and empire, the history of slavery, and the development of understandings of sovereignty and subjecthood from the sixteenth century to the present. He is currently working on a book project, tentatively titled Experiments in Order: Sovereignty, Jurisdiction, and State Formation in Early New England. This manuscript brings together his interests in colonialism and state formation to explain how English settlers in the New England colonies asserted and defended their claims to jurisdiction over lands and peoples in the Americas. It also explores the strategies by which Indigenous polities and some settler communities sought to resist or exploit colonial governments and the imperial center to their own ends.

Project

Two men look at each other. Between them, hurried graffiti reads "The End" in all capitalization. The photo is a work by the artist Ezz Monem, who photographed the 18 days of protest in Cairo in 2011. One of those photos is featured here, having been rephotographed, an acid applied to the surface to erase the emulsion from the film before the photograph is manually developed. In the image, the emulsion ripples and tears, creating broad gestures which reflects the charged content of the political photograph.

Revolutionary Disappointment and Recalibration

2026 – 2027