Dr. Isaac Kamola
Associate Professor
Department of Political Science
Trinity College
300 Summit Street
Hartford CT 06106

860-297-4071 (office)

isaac.kamola@trincoll.edu
Faculty First Responders

Academia.edu page
ResearchGate page
Trinity website
Twitter @isaac_kamola

I am currently an associate professor at Trinity College, Hartford, CT. My teaching and research interest focus on the political economy of higher education, African anticolonial theory, and critical globalization studies. My latest book project, Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War (with Ralph Wilson, forthcoming 2021), examines the dark money behind the so-called campus free speech crisis. My previous book, Making the World Global: US Universities and the Production of the Global Imaginary (Duke, 2019; ToC and Intro), examines how relationships between universities, the American state, philanthropic organizations, and international financial organizations shape the reproduction of academic knowledge about the world as global. It documents how the state-sponsored Cold War university—which imagined the world as a system of nation-states—was gradually replaced by more marketized forms of academic knowledge production and, in the process, created the conditions within which “the global” has become a particular object of knowledge.

I have also co-edited the Politics of African Anticolonial Archive (2017; with Shiera S. el-Malik ) and The Transnational Politics of Higher Education (2016; with Meng-Hsuan Chou and Tamson Pietsch).

My scholarly work has appeared in International Studies Quarterly, International Political Sociology, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, Millennium, Journal of Academic Freedom, African Identities, Journal of Higher Education in Africa, Third World Quarterly, Alternatives, Cultural Politics, Polygraph, Transitions as well as numerous edited volumes.

Before arriving at Trinity, I was an American Council for Learned Societies (ACLS) New Faculty Fellow at Johns Hopkins and a Center for the Humanities (CHUM) Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Wesleyan University. I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Minnesota in 2010.