A political theorist, Tom Donahue-Ochoa studies ideas such as “liberties”and “injustices” through trans-local lenses. That means he asks questions like, “What can we learn by looking at alike ideas in unlike places? Or by tracking a concept as it moves from one place to another? How does that movement change both the concept and those places?” 

Donahue-Ochoa is the author of Unfreedom for All: How the World’s Injustices Harm You (Oxford University Press, 2019). He has also published articles in the Journal of Social and Political Philosophy, the Review of Politics, the European Journal of Political Theory and Ethics & the Environment, among others. He has been a principal investigator or co-principal investigator on research grants from the American Political Science Association and the American Philosophical Association. 

Before joining UVA, he served as an assistant professor of political science at Haverford College; a lecturer in Yale University’s Program on Ethics, Politics & Economics; and a postdoctoral research fellow at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City. 

This year, Donahue-Ochoa will be teaching an Engagements seminar for first-year students titled “They Think WHAT? Visions of Politics” and a Department of Politics course titled “The Earth: Ethics, Politics & Economics.” He also will be writing a paper in transregional thought. Its working title is, “Democratizing Ideas: Creolizing, Fieldwork, and the Politics of Upending Categories.”