Garnet Kindervater

Garnet Kindervater is a critical and political theorist, and Clinical Assistant Professor of Liberal Studies. His research and teaching draw principally from modern continental philosophy, and critical, cultural, & political theory, while also engaging closely with critical social scientific literatures on security and climate change.

His scholarship probes questions about power and human vulnerability. In a new book-length manuscript, Kindervater explores what it means to seek safety in an age when looming disasters threaten human life almost constantly. It theorizes how shifting conceptions of life, death, and protection affect the American cultural and political landscape. As a consequence, he presents a theory of power and epistemology subtending ideologies of human security. By recasting future catastrophic events as cornerstones of political discourse, the book articulates how speculating about catastrophes animates, not only the work of security institutions, but also the discursive basis of contemporary American cultural and political life itself. He has also begun a second book project, tentatively titled “Disastrous Humanism: Paradoxes of a Murder-Suicide,” arguing that critical approaches to climate change should hinge on a revisited critique of Enlightenment humanism that refuses to abandon “the human” as its central mode of critique.

He teaches courses in the history of ideas and contemporary social & political theory. He previously taught at Dartmouth College, Fordham University, Hunter College, and the University of Minnesota.