Editors and Staff

Editor Dr. Samuel DeCanio FRGS is a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London. His research examines general theoretical questions about how knowledge interacts with social, economic, and political institutions, and specific historical questions about the creation of modern bureaucratic states. His articles have been published in the American Journal of Political Science, Critical Review, Journal of Politics, Party Politics, Social Philosophy and Policy, and Studies in American Political Development. His book, Democracy and the Origins of the American Regulatory State (Yale University Press, 2015), examines popular control over the creation of the American regulatory state in the late 19th century. His current book manuscript, Politics, Markets, and War: How Conflict and Ignorance Shape the Modern World (advanced contract with Yale University Press), studies how knowledge and ignorance influence economic markets, democratic politics, and the causes of war among states.

He has received grants from the British Academy, the Hill Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, the Raheem Sterling Foundation, the Royal Geographical Society, and the Oxford Russia Fund. In 2023 Dr. DeCanio was awarded the Thesiger-Oman International Fellowship from the Royal Geographical Society for his research into British travel writers and the Bedouin of the Middle East. Dr. DeCanio is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, he co-directs (with Dr. Michael Bankole) the Raheem Sterling Scholarship Program at King’s College London, and he is the Associate Director of the Centre for the Study of Governance and Society. Prior to arriving at King’s he was an Assistant Professor in the Political Science Department at Yale University where he was also a resident fellow of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies.

Associate Editor Jacob Roundtree is a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Economy and Society.  A political theorist by training, he writes on political epistemology and modern intellectual history. He received his PhD in political theory from Harvard in 2023, and a BA in philosophy, politics, and economics from Colby College in 2010. His dissertation is a critical genealogy of the social theories of Hegel and Marx that raises the question of whether freedom is possible in the modern world given the complexity of capitalism and the modern nation-state. He is working on revising his dissertation into a book, “The Politics of Absolute Freedom,” that will examine the political theoretic implications of the cognitive complexity of modern society.