Lisa Disch

Professor of Political Science and Women's Studies Ph.D. Political Science, Rutgers University

Contact Information:

7727 Haven Hall
505 South State Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1045
734-615-9102
Email: ldisch@umich.edu

Scholarly Interests: Contemporary continental political theory, Anglo-American and French feminist theory, political ecology, and theories of democracy.

Biography: Lisa Disch's research in both political theory and feminist theory is motivated by a concern with the power of conventions that are regarded as necessary or natural, a fascination with how they come to be looked upon that way, and an interest in the conditions under which such conventions can be challenged and changed. Feminist theory informs and inspires the way she thinks about such questions, even when she is not working explicitly on matters of gender. Her most recent book, The Tyranny of the Two-Party System (Columbia University Press, 2002) analyzes how, after a robust century of third-party participation in US politics, 20th-Century US citizens not only came to take it for granted that in this first-past-the-post system a vote for a third party is wasted, but to welcome US electoral duopoly as bulwark of their democracy. Her current research includes a project on political representation that seeks to reconcile the insight that acts of representation neither merely reflect constituencies nor originate with them but, rather, mobilize them with the democratic expectation that representative government is government “by” the people. She is also at work on a project on the reciprocal influences of contemporary French and US political theory, with a particular focus on exchanges between Anglo-American and French feminists.

Publications:

The Tyranny of the Two Party System (New York, NY: Columbia University, April 2002).

Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).

“Representation as ‘Spokespersonship’: Bruno Latour’s Political Theory.” Parallax, 14:3, 88-100.

“‘French Theory’ Goes to France.” In Judith Butler's Precarious Politics: Critical Encounters. Ed. Samuel Chambers and Terrell Carver, pp. 47-61.

“Innovation Is Overtime: An Ethical Analysis of ‘Politically Committed’ Academic Labor” (co-authored with Jeani O’Brien). In Feminist Waves/Feminist Generations: Life Stories from the Academy. Ed. Aikau, Erickson and Pierce. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (2007). 

“Impartiality, Storytelling, and the Seductions of Narrative: An Essay at an Impasse,” Alternatives 28 (2003), 253-266.

 “When a Looker is Really a Bitch: Lisa Olson, Sport, and the Heterosexual Matrix,” (co-authored with Mary Jo Kane as second author). Signs, Journal of Women in Culture and Society 21:1 (Winter 1996), 278-308.