Nicholas X. Muench

I am a comparative political theorist and intellectual historian of the Islamic world. I am currently a visiting assistant professor in political studies and history at Pitzer College, and I received my PhD in political science at UCLA in June, 2025. In my research and in my teaching, I take a global approach to the history of political thought in order to critically consider political figures and ideas that escape traditional disciplinary categories. While political theory tends to be organized around distinctly defined historical periods, ideologies, and cultural or geographically-specific canons and literatures, I attend to the movement of political thought across these categories rather than simply within them. Broader interests include Islamic Spain, early modern political thought, and pluralism and multiculturalism, especially in the context of early modern European colonialism and imperialism.