• Shannon Mariotti is Professor of Political Science at Trinity University, after having previously taught at Southwestern University for 15 years. Her scholarship focuses on democratic theory and practice, with a focus on the politics of everyday life and social reproduction. She often explores the politically valuable modes of perception, aesthetics, and experience that arise from contemplative and somatic practices as forms of embodied social change. She is generally interested in the unconventional democratic value that arises from critical and contemplative practices in seemingly apolitical spaces of retreat and withdrawal. She has explored romantic and modernist articulations of democratic theory and practice through analyzing 19th Century American Transcendentalism, and 20th century Critical Social Theory. 

    She is the author of Adorno and Democracy: The American Years (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016) and Thoreau’s Democratic Withdrawal: Alienation, Participation, and Modernity (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010). She is also co-editor of A Political Companion to Marilynne Robinson (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016). She has contributed book chapters to many volumes and published numerous articles in journals such as Political Theory, Telos, and New Political Science. 

    Her current book manuscript is titled Contemplative Democracy: Embodied Social Change as Ordinary Political Theory.

    She is on the editorial board of the journal American Political Thought, published by the University of Chicago. She co-chairs the virtual community on “Embodied Social Change and Healing Justice” for the Western Political Science Association and has also co-organized many mini-conferences on this theme. 

    • Cornell University, Ph.D. in Government (Political Theory; Gender Politics), 2006 
    • Cornell University, M.A. in Government, 2004 
    • The University of Texas at Austin, M.A. in Government, 2001 
    • American University, B.A., Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa, 1999, (Communication, Law, Economics, and Government)

    BOOKS: 

    • Adorno and Democracy: The American Years. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016).
    • A Political Companion to Marilynne Robinson. Co-edited with Joseph Lane. Part of the Political Companions to Great American Authors series. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016). 
    • Thoreau’s Democratic Withdrawal: Alienation, Participation, and Modernity (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010) as part of the “Studies in American Thought and Culture” series, edited by Paul Boyer. 

    ARTICLES and CHAPTERS: 

    • “Contemplative Superpowers for Social Change: Three New Books on How Mind-Body Practices Can Support (and Sometimes Limit) Collective Liberation,” in The Arrow: A Journal of Wakeful Society, Culture, and Politics (December, 2022). Along with the introduction we wrote, this journal was guest-edited by myself, James Rowe, and Farah Godrej. 
    • “Adorno’s Democratic Modernism in America: Leaders and Educators as Political Artists,” in The Blackwell Companion to Adorno, edited by Peter Gordon, Espen Hammer, and Max Pensky (Wiley Blackwell, 2020). 
    • “Zen and the Art of Democracy: Contemplative Practice as Ordinary Political Theory,” Political Theory: An International Journal of Political Philosophy, 48:4 (2019). 
    • “The New Progressive Federalism: Common Benefits, State Constitutional Rights, and Democratic Political Action,” in New Political Science, 41:1 (2019). 
    • “The Dispossession of the Public and the 'Common Benefits' Clause: Working Against Neoliberal Oligarchy through U.S. State Constitutions," in American Political Thought: An Alternative View, edited by Alex Zamalin and Jonathan Keller (Routledge, 2017). 
    • "The Housekeeper of Homelessness: The Democratic Ethos of Marilynne Robinson’s Novels and Essays," in A Political Companion to Marilynne Robinson. Shannon Mariotti and Joseph Lane, eds. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016). 
    • "The Mystery of Experience: Marilynne Robinson's Political Theory," by Shannon Mariotti and Joseph Lane, in A Political Companion to Marilynne Robinson. Shannon Mariotti and Joseph Lane, eds. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016). 
    • "Adorno on the Radio: Democratic Leadership as Democratic Pedagogy," Political Theory, 42:4 (2014). “Melville and the Cadaverous Triumphs of Transcendentalism,” in A Political Companion to Melville. Jason Frank, ed. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014). 
    • “Emerson’s Transcendental Gaze and the ‘Disagreeable Particulars’ of Slavery: Vision and the Costs of Idealism,” in A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Alan M. Levine and Daniel S. Malachuk, eds. (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky Press, 2011). 
    • “Damaged Life as Exuberant Vitality in America: Adorno, Alienation and the Psychic Economy,” Telos, Special Issue: Adorno in America (Winter 2009). 
    • “The Death of the First-born Son: Emerson’s Focal Distancing, Du Bois’ Second Sight, and Disruptive Particularity,” Political Theory, 37: 3 (2009). 
    • “Thoreau, Adorno, and the Critical Potential of Particularity” in A Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau. Jack Turner, ed. (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2009). 

    REPRINTED ARTICLES and REFERENCE WORKS:

    •  "Adorno on the Radio: Democratic Leadership as Democratic Pedagogy," Political Theory, 42:4 (2014). Reprinted in Theodor W. Adorno II, edited by Espen Hammer (Routledge, 2016). 
    • “Henry David Thoreau” in The Encyclopedia of Political Thought (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014). “Ralph Waldo Emerson,” in The Encyclopedia of Political Thought (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014).
    • Democratic Theory and Practice, American Political Thought, 19th Century American Transcendentalism, 20th century Critical Social Theory, Neoliberalism, Gender Politics and Feminist Political Theory, Contemplative Practices, Embodied Social Change
    • Theorizing Politics
    • American Political Thought
    • Environmental Political Theory
    • Gender Politics and Political Theory