Brittany Leach

Brittany Leach is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Politics Department at the University of Virginia. Her areas of interest include identity, subjectivity, democracy, contentious politics, sovereignty, imagination, critical theory, and continental philosophy. She approaches the study of identity from an intersectional perspective, but she is most firmly rooted in the tradition of feminist theory and gender scholarship. Within democratic theory, she focuses the role of activism (particularly protest) and other forms of agonistic disagreement. Her research on imagination deals with the ways that particular bodies and subjects are imagined, the capacity to imagine new forms of collective life, the forms of imagination we instantiate within the discipline of political science, and the faculty of imagination itself. In all of these areas, her research is guided by the insights of critical theorists (primarily those working in the traditions of feminist theory, critical race theory, and Marxism) and continental philosophers (particularly French, German, and Italian thought).