I am an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Amherst College. My research focuses on the social and political dimensions of freedom.
The fundamental question that drives my scholarship is the question of what it means to be free. Many people think that freedom is fundamentally about me—i.e., they understand freedom as a quality of my choices and my life. I take the alternative view that freedom is about us. In other words, freedom requires just social and political arrangements and so can only be achieved by citizens acting together. In contexts ranging from Kant’s theory of property to contemporary debates about gentrification, my scholarship elaborates and defends the relevance of this vision of freedom for contemporary political philosophy and the broader world.
I did my B.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. In 2024 I completed an M.S.L at Yale Law School. Before coming to Amherst College, I was a Harper-Schmidt Fellow and Collegiate Assistant Professor in the University of Chicago Society of Fellows.
You can find me at: rafeeq[dot]hasan[at]gmail[dot]com
My academic CV can be found here.