December 2025: Erin Tatz (GRS/Political Science)
Erin Tatz is a 6th year Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science and will complete her Ph.D. in May of 2026. She is the inaugural recipient of the CISS Dissertation Finishing Fellowship for the 2025-26 academic year. She was also awarded the 2024 Boston University Center for the Humanities Award for her contribution to the Humanities.
Erin works primarily in the fields of Political Theory and American Politics, specifically with regard to racial affect and the conditions of slavery and mass incarceration. Her dissertation, entitled “‘Human Like Me’: White Liberal Subjectivity and Empathic Consumption of Black Death” examines the rise of empathy in antiracist projects of political resistance — linking its emergence to liberal and colonial regimes of power and consumption. This work offers a critical intervention into the fields of race studies, racial aesthetics and affect theory, as well as Black literary and political studies. Her intervention also gains traction at the level of mainstream political discourse, as it posits that empathy, which has become pervasively and uncritically presented as a ‘solution’ to racism, actually operates as a mechanism of antiblackness and a driver for the salacious and depoliticized consumption of Black death. Against the backdrop of her critique of empathy as an artifact of liberalism and racial capitalism, she theorizes an alternative, anti-empathic form of political relationality.
Erin received a Bachelor of Arts from Occidental College in 2016 for Critical Theory and Social Justice. After the completion of her undergraduate degree and prior to joining BU in 2019, Erin spent 4 years working in urban and rural areas in Southern India in the social service sector, most prominently in the field of women’s reproductive and sexual health.
What made you decide to be a social scientist/ why does social science matter to you?
In my estimation, social science cuts to the core of the slippages and synergies that arise between our intimate, internal lives and the world around us. It prompts an engagement with the precarity and contingency of enduring in conditions of inequality, uncertainty, and suffering. At the risk of setting too somber a tone, I would say that my appreciation for social science was augmented through my personal experience with grief. As an undergraduate student, just as I was engaging with critical and political theory for the first time, my older brother died suddenly; this ongoing encounter with grief profoundly shaped my approach to scholarship. After his passing, I recall a friend attempting to reassure me by reciting the truism, “It is what it is.” I’ve always bristled against that saying. Its callous exploitation of the perceived inevitability of things seems to dismiss an appreciation for the fact that everything, everywhere, possesses a breathtaking contingency to history. Social science, I believe, spurns the simplistic concession of ‘it is what it is,’ importantly urging us to problematize those things that at first glance may appear to be natural, inevitable, or unchangeable. I find this to be a radiant and radical worldview; it maintains a kind of resilience in the face of immeasurable despair, and it grants me a great deal of purpose in my own encounters with the brutality and effervescence of being. My attachment to social science reflects my habitation of a world that is at once filled with suffering and brimming with a stunning vitality; it is borne out of my commitment to and innate belief in emancipatory projects of world-making that take as a certainty that our internal lives have a tangible relationship to the measurable world.
Can you tell us about a recent research project that you’re excited about?
I am currently co-authoring a paper which urges a paradigmatic shift in the way that racial liberation is understood in relation to policing. Previous frameworks have made great progress in assessing the effects of policing through a racial lens (for example, measuring racial disparities in police brutality), or have shed light on the ways that policing itself has engendered various racialized understandings and experiences of the world around us. Meanwhile, our framework presumes a co-constitutive relationship between racism and policing. This project, I believe, lies within the interstices of theorization and resistance – it insists that the process of liberation from (racist) policing is bound up with the practice of theorizing upon policing; in other words, it posits that in our theorization of policing, we can and must seize opportunities to establish racially emancipatory channels of project ideation, data collection, and analysis.
What is the best piece of professional advice you ever received?
“Just write!” I often find it easy to indulge in the rich and beautiful texts that inspire me and deepen my thinking without then turning to the process of synthesizing my own contributions. As a young scholar and a bit of a completionist, it can be daunting to proceed with my own writing process without feeling that I’ve read every word ever written on a given topic. When faced with this impossibility, I am grounded and returned to my work with the reminder to just begin writing.
What is your favorite course you’ve taught at BU?
As a graduate student, I’ve only had the pleasure of teaching one course of my own at BU thus far (Introduction to American Politics), and I’ve additionally had wonderful opportunities to teach discussion sections as a Teaching Fellow for various courses throughout my graduate career. Amongst the most rewarding is teaching Introduction to Political Theory. For many students, this course offers their first glimpse into famously dense and intimidating texts and thinkers, and it’s so heartening to share in moments where students begin to feel empowered to interpret, analyze, and critique these texts in their own words. It takes a measure of courage to grapple critically with towering thinkers like Marx, Locke, or Rousseau, and when students take this leap, I am invigorated by their intellectual presence and the spark of dignified individuality that they express in their contributions.
Tell us a surprising fact about yourself.
I’m currently participating in (and secretly very invested in winning) a fantasy football league. Wish me luck!