I am an Assistant Professor in the department of Political Science and International Relations at Drew University, in Madison, New Jersey, where I primarily teach a range of courses that focus on American politics and constitutional law, political theory, and gender. I am also an affiliate faculty member of the Women and Gender Studies department.
I study the development of right-wing movements in the United States, with a particular focus on the Christian Right. I am interested in understanding the proactive and forward-looking agendas of right-wing movements to identify better how these movements pose a threat to liberal democratic institutions and the provision of rights to historically underrepresented and oppressed groups. My research and teaching are both informed by a commitment to challenging supremacism, and I teach a range of courses that examine how structural inequalities in political institutions, law, and society are produced, maintained, and challenged.
My book, The Radical Mind: The Origins of Right-Wing Catholic and Protestant Coalition Building, is out now from the University Press of Kansas. In it, I examine the influence of conservative Catholic thought and Catholic New Right activists on the emergence of the New Christian Right in the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This analysis leads me to problematize the usage of backlash as an explanatory framework for right-wing mobilization. Instead of understanding the New Christian Right as reactionary and backward-looking, I emphasize its proactive nature and aims. In particular, I focus on how the movement fosters an identity of victimhood and manufactures narratives of the past to mask the radicality of its future-oriented policies, a strategy I term prefigurative traditionalism.
In addition to being a fellow at the Far-Right Analysis Network (FRAN), I am a co-founder of and fellow at the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism. I am also the co-editor of Male Supremacism in the United States: From Patriarchal Traditionalism to Misogynistic Incels and the Alt-Right.
Before coming to Drew University, I was an assistant professor at Centre College in Kentucky and a visiting assistant professor at Rollins College in Central Florida. Originally from California, I attended the University of California, Santa Cruz, for my undergraduate education. I received my M.A. and Ph.D. in Politics from the New School for Social Research in New York City in 2018.
Please feel free to contact me for more information at: cebin [at] drew [dot] edu
