Isaac Kamola is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science. His teaching and research examines the intersection of international political economy, African politics, and the politics of higher education. In the classroom he strives to challenge students to think critically about their own positionality as political and economic actors, and what this practice might mean for the project of engaging the world differently.

Isaac’s written work is published in a number of edited volumes and journals, including British Journal of Politics and International Relations, International Political Sociology, Journal of Higher Education in Africa, Third World Quarterly, and Polygraph. Before coming to Trinity, Isaac spent a year as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University and two years as an American Council for Learned Societies (ACLS) New Faculty Fellow at Johns Hopkins. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Minnesota in 2010.

• Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War, with Ralph Wilson (Pluto Press, 2021).
• Making the World Global: U.S. Universities and the Production of the Global Imaginary (Duke University Press, 2019).

• Politics of African Anticolonial Archive, Shiera S. el-Malik and Isaac Kamola, eds. (London: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2017).
• The Transnational Politics of Higher Education: Contesting the Global/Transforming the Local, Meng-Hsuan Chou, Isaac Kamola, and Tamson Pietsch, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2016).

Edited Journal Issue

• “Higher Education and World Politics” (with Neema Noori), symposium in PS: Political Science and Politics, 47(3), July 2014, 599-627.

Peer Reviewed Journal Articles

• “From Global IR to Anti-Imperial Worldmaking,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies (forthcoming).
• “Sensationalized Surveillance: Campus Reform and the Targeted Harassment of Faculty,” with Sam McCarthy, New Political Science, 2021.
• “IR, the Critic, and the World: From Reifying the Discipline to Decolonizing the University,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2020, 1-26.
  
• “Flipping the Academic Conference, or How We Wrote a Peer-Reviewed Journal Article in a Day,” with Ilan Baron, Jonathan Havercroft, Jonneke Koomen, & Alex Prichard, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 2020, 1-17.
• “The Long ‘68: African Universities, Decolonization, and the Emergence of a World University System,” Cultural Politics, 15(3), 2019, 303-314.
• “Dear Administrators: To Protect Your Faculty from Right-Wing Attacks, Follow the Money,”
  Journal of Academic Freedom, 10, 2019, 1-22.
• “Five Tips on Contingency,” PS: Political Science and Politics, 52(3), July 2019, 522-523.
• “Liberal Pacification and the Phenomenology of Violence,” with Ilan Baron, Jonathan Havercroft, Jonneke Koomen, Justin Murphy & Alex Prichard, International Studies Quarterly, 63(1), 2018, 199-212.
• “Pirate Capitalism, or the Primitive Accumulation of Capital Itself,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2018, 1-22.
• “Memories from Conferences Past: Reflections on Academic Knowledge Production,” Borderlands, 16(2), 2017, 1-13.
• “Steve Biko and a Critique of Global Governance as White Liberalism,” African Identities, 2014, 1-15.
• “U.S. Universities and the Production of the Global Imaginary,” British Journal of Politics andInternational Relations, 16, 2014, 515-533.
• “Why Global?: Diagnosing the Globalization Literature Within a Political Economy of Higher Education,” International Political Sociology, 7(1), March 2013, 41-58.  
• “Pursuing Excellence in a ‘World-Class African University’: The Mamdani Affair and the Politics of Global Higher Education,” Journal of Higher Education in Africa, 9(1&2), 2011, 147-168.
• “Creating Commons: Divided Governance, Participatory Management, and Struggles Against the  Enclosure of the University” (with Eli Meyerhoff), Polygraph 21, 2009, 15-37.
• “The Global Coffee Economy and the Production of Genocide in Rwanda,” Third World Quarterly28(3), April 2007, 571-592.

Book Chapters 

• “Searching for Sugar Man: Apartheid and the Global Imaginary,” Revisiting the Global Imaginary: Theories, Ideologies, Subjectivities: Essays in Honour of Manfred Steger, Chris Hudson and Erin K. Wilson, eds. (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019), 67-83.
• “The Arab Spring, U.S. Intervention, and the Politics of Rwandan Remorse,” U.S. Approaches to the Arab Uprisings: International Relations and Democracy Promotion, Amentahru Wahlrab and Michael J. McNeal, eds. (London: I. B. Tauris, 2018), 75-95.
• “Introduction: Politics of African Anticolonial Archive” (with Sheira S. el-Malik), in Politics of African Anticolonial Archive, Shiera S. el-Malik and Isaac Kamola, eds. (London: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2017), 1-15.
• “Amilcar Cabral and a Politics of Realism without Abstraction,” Politics of African Anticolonial Archive, Shiera S. el-Malik and Isaac Kamola, eds. (London: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2017), 83-99.
• “The Transnational Politics of Higher Education” (with Meng-Hsuan Chou and Tamson Pietsch), The Transnational Politics of Higher Education: Contesting the Global/Transforming the Local, Meng-Hsuan Chou, Isaac Kamola, and Tamson Pietsch, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2016), 1-20.
• “Situating ‘The Global University’ in South Africa,” The Transnational Politics of Higher Education: Contesting the Global/Transforming the Local, Meng-Hsuan Chou, Isaac Kamola, and Tamson Pietsch, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2016), 42-62.
  
• "The Politics of Knowledge Production: On Structure and the World of ‘The Wire,’” Everything is Connected: The Politics of HBO’s ‘The Wire’, Shirin Deylami and Jonathan Havercroft, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2014), 59-86.
• “Capitalism at Sea: Piracy and ‘State Failure’ in the Gulf of Aden,” Globalization, Social Movements andPeacebuilding, Jackie Smith and Ernesto Verdeja, eds. (Syracuse University Press, 2013), 134-158.
• “Reading the Global in the Absence of Africa,” Thinking International Relations Differently, Arlene B. Tickner and David L. Blaney, eds. (Routledge, 2012), 183-204.

• Academic Freedom Foundation grant, American Association of University Professors (AAUP),
  2021-22.
• A. Leroy Bennett Award for Best Paper (honorable mention), International Studies Association-Northeast, 2015.
• American Council for Learned Societies (ACLS) New Faculty Fellow, 2011-13.
• Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Wesleyan University, 2010-11.
• Graduate Research Partnership Program Grant, University of Minnesota, Summer 2008.