Emily C. Nacol

Assistant Professor

Emily Nacol is a political theorist whose research interests lie primarily in the history of political thought, especially early modern political theory. In particular, her work focuses on the intersection of knowledge and politics in early modernity. Professor Nacol is currently at work on a book manuscript, tentatively titled Dimensions of Risk in Early Modern British Political Thought. The book traces our current attitudes to risk to their early modern roots and asks how attention to and shifts inthinking about risk, and related conceptions of danger and uncertainty, produced a complex and nuanced conversation about the relationship among knowledge, politics, and order in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writing on politics and political economy. Professor Nacol's teaching interests include ancient and early modern political thought, theories of capitalism and political economy, and democratic theory. She received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago in 2007. Before joining the faculty at Vanderbilt in 2009, she held a research fellowship at Brown University's Political Theory Project.