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Robert Meister

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Robert Meister   
Robert Meister
    Title:  Professor of Social Sciences and Political Thought
    Email:  meister@ucsc.edu
    Phone:  (831) 459-4563 Office
    Office:  228 Kresge
    Office Hours:  Fall 2009 Contact by email to make arrangements.

Research Focus 
Professor Meister’s political thought concerns the moral relations between the beneficiaries of social and political injustice and its victims. His current book project, a critique of the late-twentieth century discourse of human rights, weaves together topics ranging from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission to Dante’s Purgatorio, from Reconstruction era American legal thought to the Nuremberg Trials, and from post-genocide Rwandan politics to psychoanalytic accounts of trauma. His previous publications have engaged Marxist analysis, the politics of recognition, political theology, US (and comparative) constitutional law, and legal theory.

Selected Publications 
"Forgiving and Forgetting: Lincoln and the Politics of National Recovery." In Human Rights in Political Transitions, C. Hesse and R. C. Post (eds.). New York: Zone Press, 1999.

"Beyond Satisfaction-Desire, Consumption, and the Future of Socialism," Topoi, 15, 2, September 1996.

"Sojourners and Survivors-Two Logics of Constitutional Protection," Studies in American Poltitical Development, 9, 2, Fall 1995.

"Is Moderation a Virtue?" In Virtue, Love, and Form, T. Irwin and M. Nussbaum (eds.), Apeiron, 26, 3-4, 1993.

Political Identity: Thinking Through Marx. Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1991.

"The Logic and Legacy of Dred Scott: Marshall, Taney, and the Sublimation of Republican Thought," Studies in American Political Development, 3, 1989.

"Vigilante Action Against Pornography: The Symbolic Destruction of Symbols," Social Text, 12, Fall 1985.

"Discrimination Law Through the Looking Glass,"Wisconsin Law Review, no. 4, 1985.

Courses Taught 
POLI-07-01 - Politics of Religion
POLI-190W-01 - Aftermath of Evil

Education History 
Ph.D., Harvard University, 1973