ISS Faculty Fellow/Contentious Knowledge Team 2006-09
Jason Frank is the Government Department's Gary S. Davis Assistant Professor in the History of Political Thought. He received his MA and Ph.D. in political science from the Johns Hopkins University, and a BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Before coming to Cornell, Frank taught at Johns Hopkins, Goucher College, University of California, Santa Cruz, Duke and Northwestern. He has also held research fellowships at UCLA's Center for 17 th- and 18 th-Century Studies, Duke's Franklin Institute for Interdisciplinary Research, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His primary field is political theory and his research and teaching interests include democratic theory, American political thought, politics and literature, the philosophy of political inquiry, and historiographical theory.
Frank works on historically situated approaches to democratic theory, with an emphasis on early American political thought and culture. Frank’s most recent research explores legal and political dilemmas engendered by the post-Revolutionary enthronement of “the people” as the legitimate ground of public authority. He is interested in the forms of political contestation that emerge around competing claims to speak in the people’s name, particularly those he calls “constituent moments.” Frank defines these as moments when claims to speak in the people’s name are politically felicitous, even though they break from the established and authorized rules and procedures for representing popular voice. Frank’s research explores the resulting dilemmas of authorization as they appear in both the formal political settings of constitutional conventions and political associations, as well as in the relatively informal political contexts of crowd actions, political oratory, and literature.
Frank is the co-editor of Vocations of Political Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 2000) and has published articles and reviews in Theory & Event, Socialist Review, Public Culture, Constellations, Political Theory, Perspectives on Politics, and The Review of Politics. He is currently finishing a book manuscript on constituent power and democratic sensibility titled Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Post-Revolutionary America, and is beginning a new book project on early American political aesthetics titled Publius and Political Imagination (under contract at Rowman & Littlefield). Frank is also editing a special double issue of Diacritics (with Tracy McNulty) dealing with the apotheosis of “the exception” in contemporary theoretical discourse.
See Jason Frank's departmental bio page.
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