Nica Siegel is Visiting Assistant Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College, prior to which she was Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Critical Theory at the Justitia Center for Advanced Studies at Goethe-Universität of Frankfurt am Main, Germany. She holds a Ph.D in Political Science from Yale University.
Her manuscript-in-progress, Politics and Exhaustion: The Phenomenology of Action and the Horizons of Critique, reconstructs the centrality of questions of political, psychic, and resource exhaustion to debates about social transformation from the 19th century onwards. In this, the book focuses on the contributions of a set of thinkers and the political communities and movements that they encountered, including Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, Herbert Marcuse, and Frank B. Wilderson III., who saw in the claim to and contestation over exhaustion paradoxical conceptual resources for revolution. This project, and her work more generally, engages with liberal and Marxist traditions, psychoanalytic, continental, democratic, feminist, ecological, postcolonial, and Black Radical thought as well as materials from social movements and the history of (de)colonial psychiatry.
Other published work can be found in POLITY; South African Journal on Human Rights; the Columbia University Press New Directions in Critical Theory book series; New German Critique; Law & Critique; Theoria: a Journal of Social and Political Theory; PhiloSOPHIA: a Journal of Transcontinental Feminism; Law & Social Inquiry; and an edited volume in NYU Press’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute Series on Race and Justice, as well as in public-facing work, for example, in parapraxis and on the podcast of psychoanalysis and politics, Ordinary Unhappiness.
Nica has further expertise in legal theory and history of political economy, with a particular focus on South African jurisprudence. Prior to her Ph.D, she received her BA hons. in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought from Amherst College before serving as an intern and researcher in Land Reform, Customary Law, and Socioeconomic Rights at the Legal Resources Centre, a constitutional impact litigation NGO in Cape Town, South Africa, where she authored policy and legal papers and continue to take part in archival and contemporary research in comparative political thought, neoliberalization and land reform, customary law, and the long democratic transition.
