Teaching Fellows

Kevin Irakoze is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Philosophy, the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity, and in the College. He received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Chicago in 2024. He also earned graduate certificates in gender and sexuality studies, as well as college teaching. He works primarily in practical philosophy at the nexus of ethics and political philosophy. His general guiding question is on how to live well amid severely adverse political situations. His dissertation, “Transfigurative Imagination: Reclaiming Meaning and Agency in African Political Life,” clarified the ethical, existential, and political implications of the reality of political failure and argued for forms of imagination and agency that best fit the context, that is, a transfigurative imagination with an ability to open up new ways of seeing reality and a protest attitude that exceeds the limits of political inertia. On the foundation of this scholarship, one of his current research projects is on political virtues, offering a critique of a functional view in which individual character serves the ends of specific forms of government, and building an alternative view which asserts the priority of an individual ethical perspective on politics. Two other current research projects are in race and sexuality: a conception of hope in the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois and a meditation on antiqueer violence in Africa through the perspective of human personhood.