Kierstan Kaushal-Carter

Kierstan Kaushal-Carter is a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania with an appointment at Penn Carey Law.

Her dissertation, “A New Ethical Foundation for Policing,” offers the first wholly normative account of “the police,” what citizens can expect them to do, and how they ought to do it. By arguing from first principles about the value of political association, the dissertation defines their duties and ethical obligations to support people’s ability to live together. Her broader research interests span political theory, the history of African American political thought, legal philosophy, and urban sociology, with particular attention to the conceptual resources these fields offer in us in shaping just political institutions.

Kierstan earned a PhD in African and African American Studies and a MA in Government from Harvard University. She earned her BA in English and American Culture Studies from Washington University in St. Louis. Her published writings can be found in The St. Louis Anthology (Belt Publishing, 2019), and The New Republic Magazine.