Like many political theorists, I have inherited a curriculum structured around the history of the Western canon, probably formalized in the latter third of the twentieth century. I am the sole political theorist at Southern Miss, and so I teach the full historical sequence, from Homer to Charles Mills. The core curriculum is a three course 'history of political thought,' with break points in familiar places: Plato to Machiavelli; Hobbes to Nietzsche; "20th century." American political thought is segmented off in its own course. There is no true Intro course.

My 'New Coordinates in Political Theory' project is aimed at redesigning this curriculum, over the course of the next five years. As the title suggests, the goal is to re-imagine the spatial and temporal coordinates of political theory, with the gamble that doing so will also reconfigure the problems we (students and instructor) theorize and the conceptual resources we bring to bear on those problems.

The project is inspired in part by the work referenced here, as well as more generally by work in Comparative Political Theory. But while this project intersects with that of Comparative Political Theory (CPT), it isn't defined by it. This is partly because I am interested in re-thinking what should count as basic training in the field (rather than the creation and legitimation of a subfield within the field); partly because I am at least as interested in non-canonical 'Western' voices (Christine de Pizan, for example); and partly because I share some of Andrew March's reservations about CPT itself.