Ph.D. Candidate
Erin is a 6th year Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at Boston University 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.
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.
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