Rate My Professor James Martel

James Martel is a professor in the Department of Political Science at San Francisco State University, where he joined as an assistant professor in 2002, was promoted to associate professor in 2007, and to full professor in 2011. He served as department chair from fall 2007 to spring 2016, with reelections in 2010 and 2013, and as interim chair in spring 2017. Prior positions include visiting assistant professor or lecturer at UC Berkeley's Department of Rhetoric from 2000 to 2002, Amherst College's Department of Political Science from 1997 to 2000, and Wellesley College's Department of Political Science from 1996 to 1997. Martel holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from UC Berkeley (1995), with a dissertation titled Love is a Sweet Chain: Liberal Subjectivity and the Dilemma of Interdependence; an M.A. in Political Science from UC Berkeley (1987); and a B.A. in Political Science from Williams College (1986).

Martel's research specializations encompass American and European political theory, legal theory, sovereignty and jurisprudence, anarchist politics and philosophy, Marxist studies, political theology, critical race studies, postcolonial studies, Indigenous studies, Black political thought, gender and sexuality studies, continental philosophy, comparative literature, literary criticism, and cultural studies. He has authored eight books, including Anarchist Prophets: Disappointing Vision and the Power of Collective Sight (Duke University Press, 2022), Unburied Bodies: Subversive Corpses and the Authority of the Dead (Amherst College Press, 2018), The Misinterpellated Subject (Duke University Press, 2017), The One and Only Law: Walter Benjamin and the Second Commandment (University of Michigan Press, 2014), Divine Violence: Walter Benjamin and the Eschatology of Sovereignty (Routledge, 2011), Textual Conspiracies: Walter Benjamin, Idolatry and Political Theory (University of Michigan Press, 2011), Subverting the Leviathan: Reading Thomas Hobbes as a Radical Democrat (Columbia University Press, 2007), and Love is a Sweet Chain: Desire, Autonomy and Friendship in Liberal Political Theory (Routledge, 2001). He co-edited the Routledge Handbook on Ecological Law and the Anthropocene (Routledge, 2023) and How Not to Be Governed: Readings and Interpretations from a Critical Anarchist Left (Lexington, 2011). Awards include the San Francisco State University Distinguished Service Award (2018) and the James Boyd White Award for lifetime achievement from the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities (2019). Martel teaches courses such as Foundations of Political Theory, Anarchist Political Theory, Political Theories of Authority, and The Political Theory of Franz Kafka. He has served as external examiner for doctoral and master's theses at institutions including UC Santa Cruz, University of Alaska Fairbanks, and Birkbeck College School of Law.