About Me

Photograph of Ishaan H. Jajodia

I am an incoming PhD student in Political Science at Yale University, where I start in this fall. Before this, I attended Dartmouth College, where I majored in Art History and minored in Government. At Yale, I hope to study political theory, with an eye toward the rehabilitation of aesthetics and aesthetic judgement in the sphere of the political.

I have always been deeply moved by visual beauty, which I have long felt is morally elevating, not merely pretty or agreeable. Beautiful experiences are cathartic and revelatory at once, bringing forth the good and subduing the bad. At the same time, I have a long-standing passion for politics, political argument, and political philosophy. An art historian reads symbols; a political theorist deconstructs them.

This is a vast, sweeping agenda. With my background in art history and political theory, I am especially interested in how the visual environment can degrade or elevate political culture. Aristotle’s ideal state is the beautiful polis where citizens partake in aesthetic leisure. Winston Churchill famously observed that ‘we shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.’ How do they shape us—and what do this mean for our politics?