Faculty

Michael Gorup's research and teaching focus on modern and contemporary political thought, U.S. political and constitutional development, and the politics of democracy, race, and capitalism. He is the author of The Counterrevolutionary Shadow: Race, Democracy, and the Making of the American People  (Kansas, 2025), which won the Foundations of Political Theory (APSA) First Book Award and received a Co-Honorable Mention for the Michael Harrington Book Award from the Critical Political Science Section of APSA. An interview about the book has recently been featured in Spectre Journal.

He is currently at work on two new research projects. One investigates how the 19th century struggle over slavery and abolition transformed the politics of freedom. Another examines recent rightwing engagements with the political thought of the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci.

Before arriving at Ithaca College in 2025, he taught at New College of Florida and the University of Pennsylvania.

PhD in Government, Cornell University

MA in Politics, The New School for Social Research

BA in Philosophy, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at the New School

Book:

The Counterrevolutionary Shadow: Race, Democracy, and the Making of the American People (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2025)

Articles:

“Abolishing Structural Domination: U.S. Reconstruction and the Double Bind of Emancipation,” American Journal of Political Science, 69, 4 (October 2025), pp. 1374-1387

“Not Subjects of the Market, but Subject to the Market: Capitalist Slavery as Expropriation,” Political Theory, 51, 6 (December 2023), pp. 981-1007

“Populism, Political Organization, and the Paradox of Popular Agency,” Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory,28, 4 (December 2021), pp. 522-536

“Subverting the American Paradox: Race, Redemption, and Revolution in David Walker’s Appeal ,” Law, Culture and the Humanities, 17, 2 (June 2021), pp. 355-376(OnlineFirst: December 8, 2017)

“The Strange Fruit of the Tree of Liberty: Lynch Law and Popular Sovereignty in the United States,” Perspectives on Politics , 18, 3 (September 2020), pp. 819-834

Book Chapters:

“The Abolitionist Movement and the Politics of Emancipation,” in Movements and American Political Thought , ed. Maxwell Burkey and Alex Zamalin, SUNY Press (2026)