Jennie Ikuta

Jennie Ikuta is an Associate Professor of Political Theory at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Her research focuses on the history of 19th and 20th century thought, with an emphasis on the role of moral psychology in politics. She is the author of Contesting Conformity (Oxford UP, 2020) and her work has been supported by the National Humanities Center, the W.E.B. Du Bois Center, and Magdalen College at Oxford. For 2025-26, she is a Racial Justice Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School.

At Bogliasco, Jennie is completing a second book project, White Losses: Moral Psychology and the Demands of Racial Justice (under advance contract, Oxford UP). This project employs the thought of Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, and James Baldwin—in conjunction with analyses of popular forms of American liberalism and contemporary political theory—to theorize the psychological transformations required by members of historically dominant groups for the sake of a more egalitarian society.