Svabek is a Teaching Fellow for the Departments of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity and Political Science at the University of Chicago. He specializes in the history of political thought, nineteenth century United States history, slavery and its afterlives, and theories of political economy. In his dissertation, Grounded Freedom: Interpreting Four Episodes in the Post-Emancipation Quest for Land, Larry reconstructs a lineage of African American thinkers that connected the idea of post-emancipation citizenship to forms of land use. Larry’s manuscript project explores one such practice, cooperation, as a response to the new forms of economic domination that arose in the post-emancipation period. He is interested in the ways that cooperation addressed prevailing conceptions of racial domination as well as how proponents formulated it as an alternative to late nineteenth and early twentieth century economic development. Larry holds a PhD and an MA in Political Science from the University of Chicago and a BA in Political Science, Economics, and Critical Theory from Northwestern University.
Research Interests: History of Political Thought, Slavery and its Afterlives, Democratic Theory, American Politics
2022-23 Courses: BA preceptor for the undergraduate research seminar (Fall, Winter), Abolition and its Afterlives (Fall), and African American Political Thought: Democracy’s Reconstruction (Spring).