Adom Getachew

Adom Getachew is Professor of Political Science and Race, Diaspora & Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. She is a political theorist with research interests in the history of political thought, theories of race and empire, and postcolonial political theory. Her work focuses on the intellectual and political histories of Africa and the Caribbean. She is the author of Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (2019) and co-editor, with Jennifer Pitts, of W. E. B. Du Bois: International Thought (2022). She is currently working on a second book on the intellectual origins and political practices of Garveyism—the black nationalist/pan-African movement, which had its height in the 1920s. Her public writing has appeared in Dissent, Foreign Affairs, the London Review of Books, the Nation, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times.
Selected publications:
- W. E. B. Du Bois: International Thought, ed. Adom Getachew and Jennifer Pitts. Cambridge University Press, 2022.
- “The Plantation’s Colonial Modernity in Comparative Perspective,” The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory, ed. Leigh Jenco, Murad Idris, and Megan Thomas. Oxford University Press, 2020.
- Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination. Princeton University Press, 2019.
- “Universalism after the Post-Colonial Turn: Interpreting the Haitian Revolution,” Political Theory 44 (December 2016): 821-845.
View Adom Getachew’s biography on the Political Science Department’s website.