Joel Olson's homepage

Joel Olson, Associate Professor
Department of Politics & International Affairs
Northern Arizona University
PO Box 15036
Flagstaff, AZ 86011-5036
(928) 523-8514

Teaching.

I teach courses on political theory at the undergraduate and graduate level, including ancient, modern, and contemporary theory, American political thought, political ideologies, democratic theory, critical race theory, extremism, and Marxist theory.

Fall 2009 courses
Click on a course to download its syllabus

POS 353 Contemporary Political Thought [coming soon]

POS 450 American Political Thought [coming soon]

Spring 2009 courses
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POS 607 Political Theory

POS 453 Marxist Theory

Other courses I teach
Click on a course to download a previous syllabus for that class

POS 230 Extremism

POS 254 Political Ideologies

POS 351 Classical & Medieval Political Thought

POS 352 Modern Political Thought

POS 453 Critical Race Theory

POS 606 Critical Race Theory

 

 

Scholarly publications

I have two research agendas. The first focuses on the relationship between race and democracy in the United States, including areas such as whiteness, abolitionism, privilege, citizenship, participation, and the ideas of W.E.B. Du Bois. The second is concerned with the role of fanaticism (or extremism) in American politics and political thought. I am currently writing a book on the political theory of fanaticism in the United States, tentatively titled, American Zealot, focusing on the abolitionists, the anti-abortion movement, the radical environmentalist movement, the Black Power movement, and Al Qaeda.

Books

• The Abolition of White Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
  

Journal articles
(If you would like a PDF of any of these articles and there is no link here, please email me and I'm happy to send you one.)

• "The Problem with Infoshops and Insurrection: U.S. Anarchism, Movement Building, and the Racial Order," Contemporary Anarchist Studies: An Introductory Anthology of Anarchy in the Academy, ed. Randall Amster, Luis Fernandez, et al. (New York: Routledge, 2009), 35-45.

• “Friends and Enemies, Slaves and Masters: Wendell Phillips, Fanaticism, and the Limits of Democratic Theory,” Journal of Politics 71, no. 1 (January 2009): 1-14. An abridged version of this article also appears as chap. 8 in Adrian Little and Moya Lloyd, eds., The Politics of Radical Democracy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009).
  
• “Whiteness and the Polarization of American Politics,” Political Research Quarterly 61, no. 4 (December 2008): 704-718.
  
• "The Freshness of Fanaticism: The Abolitionist Defense of Zealotry," Perspectives on Politics 5, no. 4 (December 2007): 685-701.
  
• “W.E.B. Du Bois and the Race Concept,” SOULS: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 7, no. 3-4 (Summer/Fall 2005): 118-128.
  
• “Whiteness and the Participation-Inclusion Dilemma,” Political Theory 30, no. 3 (June 2002): 384-409.
  
• “The Democratic Problem of the White Citizen,” Constellations 8, no. 2 (June 2001): 163-183.
  
• “The Limits of Colorblind and Multicultural Personhood,” Stanford Agora: An Online Journal of Legal Perspectives 2, no. 1 (Fall 2000): http://www.law.stanford.edu/agora/issue2.
  
• “The Revolutionary Spirit: Hannah Arendt and the Anarchists of the Spanish Civil War,” Polity 29, no. 4 (Summer 1997): 461-488.
  

Selected book reviews
(If you would like a copy of any of these reviews, please email me.)

• Review of Anarchism in America, Directed by Steven Fischler and Joel Sucher (San Francisco: AK Press Video 2006), New Political Science 29, no. 2 (June 2007): 290-93.
  
• “Political Theory and the Racial Order,” review essay, Polity 36, no. 3 (April 2004): 529-541.
  
• “Citizens, Bodies, and the Redemption of American Political Thought,” review of The Body Politic, by Catherine Holland, Theory & Event 7, no. 3 (2004).
  
• “Reconstructing the Big Apple,” review of Second Founding: New York City, Reconstruction, and the Making of American Democracy, by David Quigley, Civil War Book Review (Fall 2004), http://www.cwbr.com.