Simon Stow is the Marshall Professor of Government and American Studies and an affiliate of the Africana Studies program at the College of William and Mary. A political theorist, he works and teaches at the intersection of theory, American politics, literature, and culture, paying particular attention to issues of race.
Professor Stow is the author of American Mourning. Tragedy, Democracy, Resilience (Cambridge, 2017) and Republic of Readers? The Literary Turn in Political Thought and Analysis (SUNY, 2007), and the co-editor of A Political Companion to John Steinbeck (Kentucky, 2013). He has published articles in the American Political Science Review, American Political Thought, Perspectives on Politics, Philosophy and Literature, Theory & Event, Post-45, ANQ, and elsewhere. He has also published chapters in several edited volumes including The Democratic Arts of Mourning, Literature After 9/11, Histories of Postmodernism, Black Popular Culture and Social Justice, A Political Companion to Philip Roth, Red Reckoning: A New History of the Cold War, and American Television During a Television Presidency.
In recent years Professor Stow has taught the undergraduate classes ‘Race, Rhetoric, and Poetry,’ ‘Black Power, Black Arts, and James Brown,’ and ‘Introduction to Political Theory.’ He has also taught graduate classes on the Black Power Movement, American Memory and Mourning, and Introduction to American Studies, in the American Studies Program.