Tae-Yeoun Keum / Political Theory Workshop

Tae-Yeoun Keum joined UCSB in 2020, after four years as the Christopher Tower Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford. She is a political theorist broadly interested in ancient political thought and its reception, 20th century German social thought, and the intersection of political theory and literature. Her current research is on the role of symbols and myths in politics. Her first book, Plato and the Mythic Tradition in Political Thought (Belknap / Harvard University Press, 2020), examines Plato's myths and their modern legacy, in particular in the political thought of More, Bacon, Leibniz, the German Romantics, and Cassirer.

She is working on a second book on Hans Blumenberg, the 20th century philosopher of myth, in the context of contemporary debates in Europe on the role of symbols, narratives, and the imagination in politics. Her work has appeared in the American Political Science Review and History of Political Thought.