Editor's Note
The member spotlight is a monthly blog feature introducing fellow S-USIH members and their research. To nominate a member or be featured yourself, reach out to Lauren Lassabe Shepherd at [email protected].
Sanjana Rajagopal is an adjunct assistant professor at Lehman College, City Tech, and Fordham University. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy in May of 2025. Her dissertation was titled, “A New Triptych: Appearance, Emotion, and Thought in Hannah Arendt’s Politics.” She is currently compiling her dossier to go on the job market next fall. Apart from her teaching duties and research, she loves to read about random historical fascinations (the latest being the history of high-altitude mountaineering), travel the world, and take photos.
Sanjana Rajagopal is an adjunct assistant professor at Lehman College, City Tech, and Fordham University.
How do you define intellectual history?
In the simplest possible terms, I think of intellectual history as a meta-level reflection on how certain ideas, movements, and trends have arisen from the lived experiences, beliefs, and biases of the people who produce them.
Intellectual history is valuable for people in every field, because it can be a tool for examining what it is we value (or don’t). As a philosopher, I can’t do philosophy without intellectual history. The two go hand in hand. Often, how a philosophical concept comes about can be just as important as the concept itself. In an article I am preparing to send out for review, I argue from exactly this standpoint. I offer a novel reading of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem by focusing on her aesthetic and affective attitudes towards secondary figures in the courtroom (i.e. the judges, the prosecutor, and the testifiers), and suggest that these very attitudes are consistent with her reading of the defendant himself. Indeed, I believe the famous ‘banality of evil’ thesis was predicated on an often overlooked emphasis on external appearances, and was contingent on certain methodological vulnerabilities in Arendt’s thinking.
What are you working on now?
My current work is very much focused on revolutions, particularly the Russian Revolution (which has long been a pet interest of mine) and the Hungarian Revolution. I will be presenting a paper at APA Central in Chicago this February critiquing Arendt’s lack of attention to the Russian Revolution in her book-length study on the topic of revolutions. I am also concurrently working on an article for a special issue of Zeitschrift zum Beispiel pointing out Arendt’s tendency to cherry-pick examples for her own purposes, by offering a critical analysis of her romanticization of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.
What’s the primary source we should all be reading or teaching with right now?
It’s hard to pick just one thing, but the piece I come back to every semester as an instructor is Aime Cesaire’s devastating and poetic Discourse on Colonialism, in which the boomerang thesis (i.e. the notion that governments ‘practice’ oppressive techniques on their colonies that they will later implement on their own peoples) is first advanced. I will allow the opening sentences to speak for themselves:
“A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization. A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization. A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization.”
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