Prof. Panagia is a political theorist with multidisciplinary interests across the humanities and social sciences including democratic theory, the history of political thought, interpretive methodologies, cultural theory, media studies, aesthetics, literary studies, and visual culture.

His work specializes in the relationship between aesthetics and politics, with an ongoing curiosity about the diverse ways in which the sensation of value is generated and assembled in political societies.

Much of Prof. Panagia’s research is informed by the traditions of moral sentimentalism from the long eighteenth century to the present, especially as regards theories of association and assembly formation in the writings of David Hume, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Rancière. His current work on “#datapolitik” explores how emerging media alter the forms of power and thinking that occupy everyday living. He is also a member of UCLA’s Center for Global Digital Cultures.

Prof. Panagia has published three books: The Poetics of Political Thinking (Duke UP, 2006), The Political Life of Sensation(Duke UP, 2009), and Impressions of Hume: Cinematic Thinking and the Politics of Discontinuity (Rowman and Littlefield, 2013). In these works he explores how aesthetic sensibilities structure and inform political thinking and judgment. An overarching feature of these works is an engagement with the ontology of discontinuity as a political experience and a methodological practice in political theory.

In 2017-2018 Professor Panagia will be co-directing the Clark Professor Core Program with Sarah Kareem (English). The Core Program’s theme will be “Becoming Media.”