Lawrie Balfour

Lawrie Balfour’s career has focused on exploring the political, cultural, and moral legacies of slavery and insisting on their ongoing importance to understanding democratic life. She is the author of Democracy’s Reconstruction: Thinking Politically with W. E. B. Du Bois (Oxford University Press), The Evidence of Things Not Said: James Baldwin and the Promise of American Democracy (Cornell University Press), and numerous articles and essays on race, gender, literature, and the politics of memory.

Lawrie teaches political theory and American studies at the University of Virginia (webpage), and she has served as editor of Political Theory: An International Journal of Political Philosophy since 2017. Her project, Imagining Freedom: Toni Morrison and the Work of Words, contests the traditional study of freedom in political theory and philosophy by tracing Morrison’s reflections on its many meanings in her novels and non-fiction from the 1970s-2019. She is also at work on a book on reparations.

Photo Credit: Mark Fielding Edwards