Welcome! My name is Ani, and I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy and the SNF Paideia Program at the University of Pennsylvania. I received my PhD from the Department of Government at Cornell University in 2023, focusing on the history of political thought, feminist political theory, and democratic theory. I specialize in 20th century French feminism, contemporary French theory and its ancient Greek interlocutors, and the politics of performance, rhetoric, and persuasion.

My current book project is about the politics of voice and how women get heard in public life. I am also working on another research project that offers a new approach to thinking about free expression through the lens of elite politics.

Here’s my CV (September 2025).

*My first name is the English transliteration of my Chinese name (安妮). It is pronounced /ɑːniː/ like the musician Ani DiFranco.

Research

Lucien Blondeau and Jacqueline Moran in ‘Les bouches inutiles,’ Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Book Project

My first book project, Voices of Authority, critically addresses the question, “Why are women not heard as authoritative speakers in political life?” The relationship between voice and authority is a well-trod topic in political theory and philosophy. These two concepts—voice and political authority—often hang together in the approaches through feminist standpoint theory. Voice, on this account, is understood as embodied presence, and its authority derives from the intimate connection between one’s social and political position in the world and how that experience shapes how and what we can know about it. While the work of philosophers of epistemic justice have advanced our understanding of how the identity or the presence of the speaker informs the way a listener hears a speaker’s claims—and how listeners can meaningfully attend to their ignorance or deficits of knowledge to hear better and more just ways—this condition of possibility is dimmed by the ways these accounts place the agency of voice on the side of the listener. The move that follows is that speakers are presumed to be disempowered until the listener confers authority on their speech. As women’s claims are increasingly and violently refused in public life, feminist thinkers and activists have worried that voice is ultimately an appeal to personal experience that is ineffective for motivating collective political action against those forms of power that oppress women and other feminized subjects.

I intervene in these literatures by refusing their understanding of voice as presence that occurs in dyadic relations of political interlocution, and I offer a new theoretical approach to voice that is collective and political. More specifically, I theorize voice as an audience-making action that becomes authoritative as actors engage in poetic practices of re-making audiences for women who have been silenced, un-making patriarchy, and re-signifying the meanings attached to women’s words and bodies. Building on the work of feminist political theorists of performative claims-making, I use the lens of poetics to recover how voice is both a linguistic and embodied practice that is enacted by and on others. Voice, I argue, occurs in both silence and speech, reshaping scenes of linguistic, symbolic, semiotic, and material exchange. Viewed in this way, I argue that voice becomes a means by which subjects can transform political authority as patriarchal power into political authority as collective authorship. This is the case because the failure of being responded to by patriarchal authority figures, opens the way for women to resist and engage with others in experiences of collective constitution and political freedom that have otherwise been foreclosed to them. My book project develops this theoretical approach through novel readings of Simone de Beauvoir’s Les bouches inutiles (The Useless Mouths), Hélène Cixous’s Portrait de Dora (Portrait of Dora), and Monique Wittig’s Le voyage sans fin (Constant Journey).

Article

Chen, A. “The Poetics of Failure in Simone de Beauvoir’s Les bouches inutiles” in Contemporary Political Theory (2023).

Review Essays

Chen, A. “Review of Emily Beausoleil’s Staging Democracy: The Political Work of Live Performance” in Political Theory (2025).

Chen, A. “Review of Romand Coles’ Visionary Pragmatism: Radical and Ecological Democracy in Neoliberal Times” in William James Studies 14:1 (2018).

Occasional Writing

“#diacritics@50: An Interview with Neil Hertz.” Diacritics Blog. https://www.diacriticsjournal.com/diacritics50-an-interview-with-neil-hertz/

“#diacritics@50: An Interview with Emoretta Yang.” Diacritics Blog. https://www.diacriticsjournal.com/diacritics50-an-interview-with-emoretta-yang/

Teaching

I currently teach in the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy, housed in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. In my current role, I co-facilitate the Andrea Mitchell Center Undergraduate Research Seminar and the SNF Paideia Program’s Graduate Fellows Community.

I have extensive experience teaching courses of my own design in political theory (ancient, modern, and contemporary) and as a graduate teaching assistant across all subfields of political science. My recent courses are listed below. Syllabi are available upon request.

Democratic Theory (Spring 2026)

In the Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau said of democracy, “A government so perfect is not suited to men.” Although democracy is often invoked as the ground of political legitimacy, there is little agreement about what democracy is, how it should be implemented in institutions and law, and why citizens should desire it. Tracking both its historical development and contemporary debates, this class asks after these questions about democracy by way of four concepts—democracy, the people, justice, and participation. Unit I begins in classical Athens. We will read the works of two of democracy’s strongest critics, Plato and Aristotle, to ascertain what democracy was and what they took it to be. Understanding democracy as the rule (kratos) of the people (demos), we will then turn in Unit II to asking after who the “people” are by way of the Social Contract tradition. Unit II introduces questions about equality and inclusion, which will inform our reading in Unit III on contemporary debates surrounding questions of justice in the works of Judith Shklar, Iris Marion Young, and Danielle Allen. Finally, we will end our class in Unit IV on participation. Bringing our reading into conversation with contemporary dilemmas around political participation, we will end by considering the role of elections, social movements, and protest in democratic practice. This course is an undergraduate seminar.

The Politics of Modernity (Spring 2025)

This course re-traces modern political thought through four concepts that characterize its emergence: nature, freedom, rights, and revolution. This course engages these concepts through texts across several genres, primarily those produced in the Italian city-states, Britain, France, and Germany. Beginning with Niccolò Machiavelli, we will first consider what exactly participants in "modernity" understood themselves to be doing. Next, alongside the works of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, we will explore how these ideas about modernity inflect their understanding of nature and ground their understandings of political freedom. Then, we will engage with these insights in tandem with conflicts over notions of the citizen as a rights-bearing figure in the years of the American and French Revolutions through the works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, and Edmund Burke. We will conclude by examining the legacy of revolution in modern political thinking in the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Feminisms: Simone de Beauvoir as Political Thinker (Fall 2024)

This course explores Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. What are the political stakes for thinking and analyzing The Second Sex as a founding document of feminist thought? How has it shaped the way feminist thinkers, artists, and activists have diagnosed the promises, perils, and objects of feminism since the book’s publication in 1949, as well as its subsequent translation and transmission since? What political ideas, grammars, imaginings, and forms of action has the text enabled or foreclosed? We will begin our exploration of Simone de Beauvoir’s writings by reading The Second Sex in the context of her philosophical interlocutors. Drawing out her inhabitation of existentialism, idealism, phenomenology, and historical materialism, we will see how she builds the concepts that orient her thought. Then, in weeks 5-8, we will explore how Beauvoir implements the concepts of situation, the Other, immanence, transcendence, and ambiguity in her analysis of the statement “One is not born but becomes a woman.” Next, in weeks 9-12, we will engage with these insights from The Second Sex in tandem with Ethics of Ambiguity to understand Beauvoir’s conception of freedom. Finally, in weeks 13-16, we will read contemporary works by writers such as Lorraine Hansberry, Judith Butler, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Hortense Spillers, and Monique Wittig, and others to understand how The Second Sex functions as a critical text for feminist political theorizing in the 20th and 21st century.

Ancient Political Thought (Fall 2024)

Ancient political debates about democracy, empire, and justice appear in late fifth-century BCE Athenian dramatic, historical, and philosophical literatures. Reading selected tragedies of Aeschylus and Euripides, comedies of Aristophanes, philosophical works of Plato and Aristotle, in combination with the histories of Thucydides, and forensic speeches of Demosthenes, this course retraces, explores, and interrogates these texts’ complex, provocative, and surprisingly relevant arguments for and against democracy, as well as their often unexpected results in practice.