Shaunna Rodrigues
Core Lecturer in Contemporary Civilization, Columbia University
Shaunna’s research bridges the traditions of liberalism, anticolonialism, constitutionalism, and the ethics of technology. Her work examines how political communities justify democratic self-rule, legal authority, and political legitimacy after empire, and how infrastructures of knowledge and technology continue to shape those justifications today.
Her research and teaching are guided by an overarching question: how can political and ethical frameworks sustain legitimacy in plural and technologically mediated societies? To answer it, she connects the history of political thought with the study of law, postcolonial democracy, and artificial intelligence. Across these domains, her work traces the entanglement between constitutionalism, knowledge, and the ethics of power, asking how forms of reasoning and classification become foundations for authority and recognition.
Shaunna’s research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Columbia University’s Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life, and the Columbia Core Curriculum.
Research
Shaunna’s first book project, Justification After Empire: Constitutionalism, Knowledge, and the Ethics of Power, examines how political communities reconstruct legitimacy in the aftermath of empire. The book argues that modern political life cannot be understood without recognizing how the justificatory logics of empire were dismantled, contested, and reconstituted in postcolonial thought and institutions. It situates constitutionalism not simply as a legal framework but as an epistemic practice through which societies negotiate intelligibility, progress, and self-respect.
The book traces how political actors towards the end of modern empires redefined the grammars of intelligibility, progress, and self-respect into new grounds for constitutional and democratic life. In doing so, it shows that anticolonial ethics were not only opposed empire, they also redefined the moral and epistemic bases of modern politics, offering plural criteria for reason, advancement, and human dignity after empire. Justification After Empire connects these transformations to contemporary crises of legitimacy, from majoritarian politics to constitutional amendments, and the algorithmic governance of public life.
Her publications can be found here.
Shaunna’s second book project explores the ethics and governance of artificial intelligence. Drawing on the conceptual foundations of Justification After Empire, she develops the Knowledge of Structures Problem as a framework for understanding how algorithmic systems inherit and transform classificatory logics of empire. This research explores how digital infrastructures reshape the moral and constitutional bases of legitimacy by determining whose knowledge counts, which lives are visible, and how rights are operationalized. Through this work, she seeks to contribute to emerging debates on algorithmic justice, data sovereignty, and the global governance of AI.
Teaching
At Columbia University, Shaunna teaches the Core Curriculum’s Contemporary Civilization, where she introduces students to foundational texts in political, moral, and religious thought from antiquity to modernity. Her teaching integrates canonical and non-Western traditions, encouraging students to examine how questions of legitimacy, power, justice, and self-respect have been posed across different historical and cultural contexts.
She has also designed and taught Gandhi and His Interlocutors, a global core course that explores the philosophical and political debates surrounding Gandhi’s anticolonial thought, and Anticolonialism, Constitutionalism, and Democracy in South Asia, which examines how anticolonial ideas continue to shape constitutional design and democratic practice. Her teaching invites students to link classical concepts like authority, equality, citizenship with the pressing political and ethical questions of the present.
Education
Shaunna holds a B.A. in Economics from St. Stephen’s College, New Delhi; an M.A. and M.Phil. in Political Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi; and an M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies from Columbia University. She was an Early Career Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia from 2023–2024 before joining the faculty as a Core Lecturer in Contemporary Civilization.
Digital Projects
In 2025, Shaunna co-founded the Common Worlds Project with Valerian Rodrigues. The project produces short-form public philosophy videos on figures and movements that shaped South Asian political thought, highlighting their relevance to contemporary debates on equality, self-respect, democracy, and constitutionalism. These conversations appear across platforms including Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok, as part of an effort to make the philosophical dimensions of anticolonialism accessible to a wider public.
Contact and Website