Sam Galloway

Dr. Galloway teaches courses that explore topics such as protest, media, biopolitics, law, cultural aesthetics, and ideology at the intersections of race, sexuality, gender, class, ability, and citizenship. They are a contributing faculty member to Global Black Studies and Gender Studies, and teach courses toward Law and Justice Studies.

For fun, they enjoy dancing, hiking, birdwatching, and writing songs on their guitar (which they play poorly).

Dr. Galloway’s research examines questions of democracy, law, and affect in contemporary and canonical political thought and practice.

While at Purchase, Dr. Galloway has finished their first book, Cruising Politics: Affect, Assemblage, Agonism (Palgrave, 2026), which develops a democratic habitus of contentious political action through the heuristic of cruising relations that are fleeting, but impactful, accelerated, but efficacious, anonymous, yet intimate, marked by rhythms of recurrence, not perdurance, and which texture the world with destitutent claims to remake the terms of order. Across readings of Nietzsche, Arendt, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, and Agamben, I develop an account of contemporary democratic politics under conditions of networked publicity through an archive that ranges philosophical allegory, surrealist poetry, popular cinema, internet memes, and bicycle-ridden performance art.

Galloway’s current book project, Despair for Democracy, looks at political responses to feelings of despair, not as pathology or indulgence, but as a transitional affect that conduces community in negativity, genre flails to prime affective pedagogy in the face of catastrophe, acts with a realistic radicalism, and which is affectively and strategically “noisy.” Across cases that range early AIDS activism to contemporary Black Lives Matter organizing, through consideration of political relations on social media and in movement strategy, Despair tarries with the role of negative affect in each instance as heightening, rather than foreclosing, conditions of possibility for alternative futurities. In this way, I do not write against despair, but rather ask after its affordances for those living with political hopelessness to ask, what can be done with our despair - and how?

Concurrently, with Danielle Hanley (Clark University), Dr. Galloway is developing an edited volume on Lauren Berlant’s legacy in the field of political theory, On the Inconvenience of Lauren Berlant: Precarity, Intimacy, Attachment with Duke University Press. In addition to contributing an essay to the volume, “Can You Stomach It?,” which reflects upon an Instagram reel that depicts a “live sex act” - a shirtless obese man imbibing cola and mentos to affect a super spherically-swollen stomach - to ask after our taste for disruption of the ordinary and how we metabolize such solicitations of our tastes for normalcy amidst conditions of chronic war. How do we navigate the ‘cortisol spike’ culture of ascendant authoritarianism? The obese man converts expectations for a fail vid into an occasion of auto-affectionate self-augmentation that propositions viewers to suspend judgment in the temporality of the loop of the reel to see his spectacular feat opening a different potentiality. What if we imagine this fat man thriving and athletic - felicitous on our timeline and beneficent in his gift of self?

This refiguring of a figure of otherwise “slow death” as a sign of lively fecundity is characteristic of the work of our Introduction, which honors the legacy of Lauren Berlant and who - despite the chronic negativity of their archive, which dwelt with fidelity in scenes of sexual trauma, racial humiliation, familial abandonment, romantic neglect, and political and workplace abuse - nevertheless consistently scrounged and scrapped together an optimistic “something” that could break with deadening convention and open on to radically re-enlivening horizons. We propose that in assembling leading and emerging political theorists in concerted reflection on Berlant’s oeuvre, we undertake that collaborative work of producing the “something” that keeps theory lively.

- Intro to Political Theory (POL2110)

- Environmental Justice (POL2080)

- Politics and Social Media (POL2210)

- America on Film (POL2610)

- America Constitutional Law (POL3050)

- Political Protest and Ideology (POL3290)

- The Art of (Culture) War in American Politics (POL3530)

- Queer Politics in the US (POL3095)

BOOKS

• Galloway, Sam. Cruising Politics: Affect, Assemblage, Agonism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026). https://link.springer.com/book/9783032234308 

ARTICLES, REVIEWS.

• Galloway, Sam. (2026). “Book Review: Love Troubles: A Philosophy of Eros, by Federica Gregoratto.” Political Theory, Online First. https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917261427361
  
  
• Cohen, Aylon, and Samuel R. Galloway. “Grooming Authoritarianism: Anti-Trans/Queer Panic as Pedagogy for Democratic Decline.” PS: Political Science & Politics 58, no. 3 (2025): 456–60. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096524001197.

• Galloway, Samuel, Ali Aslam, Ashleigh Campi, and Hagar Kotef. “Lauren Berlant’s legacy in contemporary political theory.” Contemporary Political Theory 22, no. 1 (2023): 118-142. doi.org/10.1057/s41296-022-00584-3

•  Galloway, Samuel. “Queering Amor mundi: Love, Loss, and Democratic Politics.” Theory & Event 24, no. 3 (2021): 758-786. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tae.2021.0042.

PROJECTS IN DEVELOPMENT

• Despair for Democracy 
• On the Inconvenience of Lauren Berlant: Precarity, Intimacy, Attachment.