Faculty
Stephen Cucharo
Visiting Assistant Professor of Instruction
Contact
Home Campus: Tampa
Office: SOC 360
Email: schucharo@usf.edu
education
Ph.D., Political Science, UCLA, 2024
M.A., Politics, New School for Social Research, 2017
M.S., Global Affairs, New York University, 2014
B.A., Political Science, Fordham University, 2011
BIO
Broadly speaking, my work explores how political theorists in the modern and contemporary periods make sense of human suffering. More specifically, I am interested in how political theorists conceptualize negative emotions like guilt, despair, demoralization, melancholy, and anxiety as consequential and potentially action-oriented elements of political experience. My current book project Guilty Subjects, Reparative Politics: On Guilt and Political Theory After Freud is an attempt to reconsider the political significance of guilt-feelings beyond the dominant Freudian framing that holds them as expressions of self-punishment or anxiety in the face of an authoritative demand.
I hold additional research interests in critical theory, fascism and fascist political thought, psychoanalysis and politics, pessimism, and political theory during the War on Terror. My work has been published or is forthcoming in Contemporary Political Theory, parallax, and Polity.
Selected Publications
鈥淛ohn Rawls and Liberal Guilt鈥� (Forthcoming in Polity)
parallax, Vol: 29, Issue: 03. 303 鈥� 322 (2023) DOI:10.1080/13534645.2024.2302665
鈥淛ustice Beyond Repair: Negative Dialectics and the Politics of Guilt and Atonement鈥� Contemporary Political Theory, 21, 397鈥�418 (2022) DOI: 10.1057/s41296-021-00528-3