I studied political theory at the University of California, Los Angeles. Since 2001, I have taught at the University of Pittsburgh, where I am Professor of Political Science, of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies, and of Philosophy (by courtesy). I have held residential research fellowships from the Swedish Academy for Advanced Study (2021-22) and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2008-09) and was Guest Professor at the Hertie School of Governance, Berlin, from 2008-10. 

My early work focused on democratic theory. In Democracy as Human Rights: Freedom and Equality in the Age of Globalization (Routledge 2005), I argued that globalization exposes the familiar and largely unquestioned conception of democracy as popular sovereignty as historically contingent and normatively problematic. The book recovers and rehabilitates an emancipatory conception of democracy as human rights, one whose realization requires the thoroughgoing democratization of all kinds of governance relationships. More recently, I have written about injustice and related questions of accountability and responsibility. In Injustice: Political Theory for the Real World (Oxford 2018), I critiqued conventional approaches to theorizing justice and offered a radical alternative that transforms our thinking about what kind of problem injustice is and how political theorists might better understand and address it. 

My current book project, The Enigma of Human Rights, applies that approach in offering a critique of the cosmopolitan Human Rights Project and articulating an alternative, emancipatory conception of human rights. The book questions the ubiquitous assumption, shared by critics and defenders of human rights, that there is some single way or thing that human rights really are. Taking the complexity and multiplicity of rights as the starting point for theorizing them, rather than as an obstacle to be overcome on the way to understanding them, and drawing on radical social movement praxis, my account offers transformative perspectives on old debates and provides new resources for thinking politically with and about human rights. For a taste of the argument, see my recent article in De Ethica: "The Human Rights Project and the Limits of Cosmopolitan Rights."

From 2017-2021 I was Director of Pitt's Global Studies Center, a Title VI National Resource Center. I serve on the editorial boards of Perspectives on Politics, The Journal of Human Rights, and Polity.  I was co-President of the Association for Political Theory from 2017-2020 and have held numerous positions in the Association. I chaired the APSA Task Force on Democracy, Social Justice, and Economic Security in a Volatile World (2010–12) and was President and am a founding member of the APSA Human Rights organized section (2004-05). At Pitt, I'm a Faculty Fellow in the Frederick Honors College and a member of the Provost's Committee on Anti-Black Racism and Transformative Pedagogy and the University Sustainability Task Force, among many.