Kirstine Taylor (Ph.D., 2015, University of Washington) has been appointed the Inaugural WISIR Postdoctoral Prize Fellow. The prize fellowship recognizes a current UW postdoc for excellence in the study of inequality and/or race, and comes with a research stipend.
Kirstine is a Postdoctoral Lecturer in the Department of Political Science. She specializes in political theory and American politics, and is interested in how relationships of race, innocence, and identity manifest in American democratic institutions. She is currently at work on a book titled The Alchemy of Racial Innocence: From the Postwar South to Post-Racial America. The book draws on texts in African American political thought, democratic and contemporary theory, and American political development to offer a new interpretation of the problem of ‘racial innocence’ in contemporary America—arguing that innocence is fundamentally a product of our political institutions. Her article “Untimely Subjects: White Trash and the Making of Racial Innocence in the Postwar South,” appeared in American Quarterly in March 2015. A second article, “Covering Legal Mobilization: A Bottom-Up Analysis of Wards Cove v. Antonio” (co-authored with Michael McCann and George Lovell) appeared in Law & Social Inquiry in Summer 2015.