Research

The central question that unites much of my work is to what extent (if any) social and political life depend on visions of a better future, what happens when they are lost, and how can we reclaim them. I believe that the loss of future we currently experience constitutes one of the most significant social and political challenges of our time, yet we lack a proper philosophical grasp of its implications, let alone strategies for addressing it.

My current research project (funded by the VolkswagenStiftung’s Freigeist Initiative) aims to develop a political philosophy of hope. To do so, I bring together recent analytic debates about the nature and norms of hope as well as ‚Frankfurt School‘ debates about history and progress. My book Democratic Hope – Imagination and the Political Future will come out with Oxford University Press in October 2026.

I also have a strong track record in Kant scholarship and a keen interest to make insights from Kant’s philosophy fruitful for contemporary normative questions. In earlier work, I focused in particular on questions of migration, membership and boundaries. In my first book Kant’s Grounded Cosmopolitanism (Oxford University Press 2022), I developed a novel reading of Kant’s cosmpolitanism as spelling out the implications of the simple fact that a plurality of corporeal agents coinhabit the earth’s spherical surface.