Research Bio

Desmond Jagmohan is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in the history of American and African American political thought, with a focus on the politics of the oppressed. His first book, Dark Virtues: The Tragic Realism of Booker T. Washington (Princeton University Press, October 2026), examines the politics of deception under Jim Crow. He is at work on two new projects: Three Traditions of African American Political Thought, an intellectual history spanning 1850 to 1970, and A Duty to Remember: Slavery and the Ethics of Memory. His work has appeared in the Journal of Politics, Political Theory, NOMOS, Annual Review of Political Science, Perspectives on Politics, Politics, Groups, and Identities, Contemporary Political Theory, and Boston Review. 

In 2026, Jagmohan received the  Distinguished Teaching Award, the University of California, Berkeley's  highest honor for teaching, which only 233 faculty members have received since 1959. In 2025 he received the U.C. Berkeley’s Division of Social Sciences Distinguished Teaching Award. He received an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Research Fellowship (2026) and was a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Human Values (2022–23), a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University (2018), and the recipient of the American Political Science Association's Best Dissertation Award from the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section (2015). Before joining UC Berkeley, Jagmohan was Assistant Professor of Politics at Princeton University, where he delivered the 2018 Constitution Day Lecture and was awarded the Laurance S. Rockefeller Preceptorship. 

Jagmohan holds a PhD and MA from Cornell University and served in the US military before and during his undergraduate at Northeastern Illinois University.   

PUBLICATIONS

Books

Dark Virtues: The Tragic Realism of Booker T. Washington (Forthcoming from Princeton University Press, 2026).    

Journal Articles & Book Chapters

“Lockeanism: The Image of John Locke in Cold War America,” The Political Thought of John Locke: New Perspectives, eds. David Armitage, Teresa M. Bejan, and Felix Waldmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2026), 206–230. Co-authored with Steven Kelts.  

“Three Traditions of African American Political Thought: Realism, Reformism, and Nationalism,” Annual Review of Political Science 27 (July 2024): 47–61. 

“Popular Republicanism and Racial Exclusion,” The Oxford Handbook of Republicanism, eds. Frank Lovett and Mortimer Sellers (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2024).

“Reparations without Reconciliation,” NOMOS LXV: Reconciliation and Repair, eds. Melissa Schwartzberg and Eric Beerbohm (New York: New York University Press: 2023), 140–180. 

“Peculiar Property: Harriet Jacobs on the Nature of Slavery,” Journal of Politics 84, no. 2 (April 2022): 669–681.

“Booker T. Washington and the Politics of Deception,” African American Political Thought: A Collected History, eds. Melvin L. Rogers and Jack Turner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 167–191.

“Between Race and Nation: Marcus Garvey and the Politics of Self-Determination,” Political Theory 48, no. 3 (June 2020): 271–302. 

“Race and the Social Contract: Charles Mills on the Consensual Foundations of White Supremacy,” Politics, Groups, and Identities 3, no. 3 (September 2015): 488–503.

Research Expertise and Interest

history of political thought, American political thought, African American political thought, race and American political development