About

Roxanne Euben is the Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Social Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. Her academic role is situated within the Department of Political Science, where she contributes to the social sciences with her expertise. The provided page text does not include specific details about her research focus, background, or key contributions, and no additional biographical information is available from the content provided.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Social Science
• Philosophy
• Epistemology
• Economics
• Physics
• Quantum mechanics
• Positive economics
• Psychology
• Environmental ethics
• Aesthetics
• Linguistics
• Social psychology
• Media studies
• Law and economics

Selected publications

• Driven to Their Knees

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2025-09-02 · 1 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Driven to Their Knees

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2025-06-20

  book1st authorCorresponding

  How the rhetoric of humiliation defines the powerful and the powerless in modern politics Humiliation pervades our politics, from images of stripped Palestinian men in Gaza to mocking chants at MAGA rallies. It suffuses pictures and videos, speaks through bodies as well as words, and is expressed by those with too much power as well as by those with too little. In Driven to Their Knees , Roxanne Euben takes readers from conflicts in the Arabic-speaking world to America’s divided public square, advancing a theory of humiliation rooted in the ways people articulate and enact it. She analyzes some of the most conspicuous but least studied Arabic expressions of humiliation, drawing on sources that range from Qurʾānic commentary by Islamists to anonymous tweets during the 2011 Egyptian revolution, videos to poetry, slogans to songs. Driven to Their Knees reveals what the language of humiliation says—and also how it works. It shows how humiliation expresses the imposition of impotence by those with undeserved power and how it is a matter not just of power but virility. The rhetoric of humiliation defines both the humiliated and the humiliator and issues an urgent call for a remedy in the viscerally charged language of emasculation. For Donald Trump and Usama bin Laden alike, this means driving their enemy to his knees for all to see, and then boasting about it to compound the degradation. But for others, humiliation galvanizes their struggle to “stand erect,” uniting them in a refusal to be bowed low.

  PublisherDOI

• Visual Rhetoric, Retaliatory Humiliation

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Aesthetics

  Abstract The ISIS videos staging the executions of American captives are usually understood within the logic of instrumental rationality as devices to deter, recruit, and “sow terror.” By contrast, taking these videos as performative events and communicative acts in need of close reading brings into sharp relief a disjuncture between what they say and how they work. While the verbal rhetoric largely hews to the logic of instrumental rationality, the visual rhetoric enacts what Islamists define as retaliatory humiliation, an inversion of power in two different registers. It symbolically converts the public abjection of the captives by the Islamist executioner into an enactment of ISIS’s invincibility and American impotence. Second, it transposes the roles between the United States—mass terrorist, failed sovereign, and rogue state—and ISIS, now repositioned as legitimate, invincible sovereign. Circulating repetitively across digital networks, the events depicted are constituted as continually unfolding, part of an ongoing present rather than a completed past. This makes available to millions the viscerally intense and immediate experience of witnessing such humiliation, soliciting spectators either to suffer vicariously with the victim—or relish the brutal humiliation of two men who have, through metonyomic slide, become the American body politic. Inasmuch as such rhetorical practices seek to actually constitute their audiences through the visual and visceral power of their address, the end of ISIS’s caliphate in Iraq and Syria augurs not the irrelevance of the videos but the remaking of their affective power in aspirational terms.

  PublisherDOI

• “Comparative Political Theory” and the Displacement of Politics

  Philosophy and Global Affairs · 2022 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Social Science

  Over the course of the past few decades, comparative political theory has acquired a measure of institutional legitimacy and intellectual recognition as part of the ongoing, interdisciplinary challenge to prevailing academic categories, coordinates, and borders. This arrival has been accompanied by a conspicuous focus on methodology both by those who claim the mantle of comparative political theory and those who reject it. The following reflections read this focus symptomatically, as revealing intellectual, institutional, and professional exigencies rather than as distinct to any particular scholar, argument, or publication. Neither a “state of the field” nor a proprietary defense of what comparative political theory is or should be, these observations toggle back and forth between reflections on my own engagement and disengagement with the topic of comparative political theory on the one hand and, on the other, concerns about how this preoccupation with method simultaneously expresses and exacerbates the displacement of politics in the very field that aims to understand it. Among the questions I raise are: What might be driving this disproportionate focus on methodological arguments in and about comparative political theory? What are the stakes of such a focus, particularly for younger scholars in political science departments decreasingly hospitable to political theory? Finally, what does this augur for the future of the study of politics broadly understood within disciplines dedicated to the scientific study of human behavior?

  PublisherDOI

• Beyond Law and Liberalism: Power, Difference and <i>Ṭalab al-ʿilm</i>

  Political Theology · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  For some time now, the question about tolerance of religious diversity has largely been constituted in the terms of political liberalism: as a normative problem for a well-ordered (liberal democrat...

  PublisherDOI

• Tragedy, education, democracy: J. Peter Euben’s Political Theory

  Contemporary Political Theory · 2020

  • Sociology
  • Social Science
  • Political Science
  PublisherDOI

• Humiliation through the Prism of Islamic Thought

  2019-12-11

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding

  The prevailing definition of humiliation as a violation of human dignity or respect has assumed the status of common sense, despite its elusive and derivative content. models how the dominant definition can be denaturalized and even displaced to render legible figurations of humiliation in other bodies of knowledge. It specifically traces the career of the concept and phenomenon of humiliation across three corpora foundational to Islam, the Qur’an, the Ḥadīth, and Islamic law. These texts trace different agentic sources in various combinations depending on site, subject, and stakes. The result is not a linear account of the “evolution” of humiliation in Islam, but rather a spectrum of shifts and contingencies, continuities and reversals. These arguments are adduced not in support of an Islamic theory of humiliation, but as resources for a provisional account of humiliation as a hierarchical relation instantiated in the act and experience of imposed powerlessness. So understood, this analysis of Islamic sources is just one part of an ongoing investigation into the range of resources—located in multiple traditions, practices and corpora past and present—for building up a political theoretic conception of humiliation grounded in asymmetries of power.

  PublisherDOI

• ‘Extracting Gold’ from Paris: A Nineteenth-Century Egyptian Journey in Search of Knowledge

  2017-12-02

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  How, for instance, has travel and exploration by Muslims produced and transformed their own sense of Self and Other? What would it mean to invert the questions that reproduce the West as the epicentre of the world? This chapter presents such questions by analysing the landmark nineteenth-century rihla of Rifa'a Rafi' al-Tahtawi, a member of the first student mission the Egyptian leader, Muhammad 'Ali, sent to Paris. The 'extraction of gold' in the Rihla not only refers to Tahtawi's sifting of French manners, customs, politics and ideas for valuable lessons, but also suggests how Takhlis must itself be read. The chapter suggests that determining Tahtawi's own political and intellectual commitments in the Rihla is greatly complicated by the adab style of the Takhlis. Tahtawi is careful to note the passion for knowledge and love of travel evident even among women—at one point admitting that there are some Frenchwomen of great virtue—yet concludes rather summarily that most are corrupt.

  PublisherDOI

• Spectacles of Sovereignty in Digital Time: ISIS Executions, Visual Rhetoric and Sovereign Power

  Perspectives on Politics · 2017-11-20 · 52 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The ISIS videos staging the executions of James Foley and Steven Sotloff are usually understood as devices to deter, recruit, and “sow terror.” Left unanswered are questions about how these videos work; to whom they are addressed; and what about them can so continuously bring new audiences into existence. The evident durability of ISIS despite the imminent defeat of its state, coupled with the political impact of these particular videos, make these questions unusually urgent. Complete answers require analysis of the most understudied aspect of the videos that also happens to be vastly understudied in US political science: the visual mode of the violence. Approaching these videos as visual texts in need of close reading shows that they are, among other things, enactments of “retaliatory humiliation” (defined by Islamists) that perform and produce an inversion of power in two registers. It symbolically converts the public abjection of Foley and Sotloff by the Islamist executioner into an enactment of ISIS’ invincibility and a demonstration of American impotence. It also aims to transpose the roles between the US, symbolically refigured as mass terrorist, failed sovereign, and rogue state, and ISIS, now repositioned as legitimate, invincible sovereign. Such rhetorical practices seek to actually constitute their audiences through the very visual and visceral power of their address. The affective power of this address is then extended and intensified by the temporality that conditions it—what I call digital time. Digital time has rendered increasingly rare ordinary moments of pause between rapid and repetitive cycles of reception and reaction—moments necessary for even a small measure of distance. The result is a sensibility, long in gestation but especially of this time, habituated to thinking less and feeling more, to quick response over deliberative action.

  PublisherDOI

• Humiliation and the Political Mobilization of Masculinity

  Political Theory · 2015-07-01 · 15 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Islamist rhetoric about the humiliation of Islam and American rhetoric about national humiliation have been energized by disparate events in recent years, from the photographs of American soldiers in Mogadishu, Somalia to the invasion of Iraq, the “Innocence of Muslims” video to the attacks on 9/11. At the same time, there’s been an explosion of scholarship on humiliation as a driver of international conflict and political violence in general, and in relation to the bodies and minds of Muslims in particular. The link between humiliation and Muslims is thus a co-production between Islamists who continually invoke it and scholars from various disciplines and regions who regularly posit it. Yet there’s been very little analysis of humiliation in Islamist discourse; minimal effort to anatomize the ways in which this experience of humiliation is constructed to necessitate particular kinds of retaliatory action; and no attempt to theorize more broadly about patterns and discontinuities in how different rhetorics construct humiliation. This article takes up the following questions: What is the substantive content of humiliation in such rhetoric and analysis? Do these different rhetorics of humiliation articulate the same understanding of it, as an act and an experience? What does close analysis of Islamist discourse on humiliation in comparative perspective reveal about the political stakes and affective resonances articulated and energized by it in this particular moment in history? Finally, what do the answers to these questions say about the reach and limits of the dominant account of humiliation as the violated dignity or injured self-respect of a generic individual?

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jill Frank

  2 shared

• P.J. Brendese

  2 shared

• Jason Frank

  Cornell University

  2 shared

• Arlene W. Saxonhouse

  2 shared

• Robert W. Hefner

  2 shared

• Karen Bassi

  2 shared

• Richard W. Bulliet

  Princeton University

  2 shared

• Khaled Fahmy

  Tufts University

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• Fellowship from the John S. Guggenheim Foundation (2016-17)
• Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2…
• Fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study a…
• Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (2…
• Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation (2002)