Writing

Essays and interviews

• “An Alternative Future for Struggling Colleges”

  Los Angeles Review of Books, August 15, 2026

  An essay with Tommaso Bardelli, joining a growing conversation about the emerging microcollege movement.

• “Associational Vibrancy: Talking to Joel Schlosser”

  Los Angeles Review of Books, December 21, 2017

  An interview by Andy Fitch on self-examination, civic engagement and the politics of philosophy.

Articles and book chapters

• “Democracy and the Unconscious”

  Polity, 2024. With Ali Aslam and David W. McIvor.

• “Visionary political theory”

  Contemporary Political Theory, 2023. With Ali Aslam and David W. McIvor.

• “‘What Really Happened’: Varieties of Realism in Thucydides’ History”

  The Cambridge Companion to Thucydides, 2023

• “A Democratic Turn within Democratic Socialism? State-Centric and Anti-Statist Visions of Socialism and the Challenge of Democratic Mirroring”

  New Political Science, 2021. With Ali Aslam and David W. McIvor.

• “A Poetics of American Citizenship: Blackness, Injury, and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen”

  Law, Culture and the Humanities, 2020

• “The Political Theorist at Thebes”

  Contemporary Political Theory, 2020

• “Democratic Theory When Democracy Is Fugitive”

  Democratic Theory, 2019. With Ali Aslam and David W. McIvor.

• “Speaking Silence: Holding and the Democratic Arts of Mourning”

  The Democratic Arts of Mourning, 2019

• “Remembering Peter Euben”

  Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek Political Thought, 2018

• “Joan Didion and the American Dream”

  Raritan, 2018

• “Herodotus’s Political Ecologies”

  Democratic Moments, 2018

• “Herodotean Democracies”

  CHS Research Bulletin, 2016

• “The Polis Artist: Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis and the Politics of Literature”

  Theory & Event, 2016

• “Herodotean Realism”

  Political Theory, 2014

• “Socrates in a Different Key: James Baldwin and Race in America”

  Political Research Quarterly, 2013

• “‘Hope, Danger’s Comforter’: Thucydides, Hope, Politics”

  The Journal of Politics, 2013

Book reviews and a complete list of publications are in Joel's CV (PDF).