Elvira Basevich
2025-2026 Visiting Faculty Fellow, Center for Ethics
Biography
Elvira Basevich is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at UC-Davis and a 2025-2026 Visiting Faculty Fellow at The Murphy Institute’s Center for Ethics.
Basevich’s research areas are political philosophy, Africana philosophy, and late modern German philosophy, especially Kant, Hegel, and Marx. Her current research projects include a book on W.E.B. Du Bois's theory of democracy that tackles why grassroots democratic practices led by historically excluded groups can help philosophers rethink the requirements of justice—namely, what the content of justice is about and how best to realize it in the circumstances of injustice. She is also working on issues relating to slavery, exploitation, and race in the 19th and 20th century U.S.
Publications
Books
Counter Publics: Du Bois and Democratic Practice behind the Color Line. (Under contract with Oxford University Press)
W.E.B. Du Bois: The Lost and The Found. (Cambridge: Polity, 2020)
Edited Works
Editor of Special Issue on “W.E.B. Du Bois and Democracy” in The Monist (2024)
Editor of Special Issue in Honor of the 25th Anniversary of Charles Mills’ The Racial Contract in Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy (2024)
Select Articles & Book Chapters
Forthcoming. “Rawls and Racial Justice,” in Christie Hartley, Blain Neufeld, and Lori Watson (eds.) Oxford Handbook on the Philosophy of John Rawls.
Forthcoming. “From Social Darkness to Epistemic Light: A Critique of Mills on Ideology Critique,” in Sally Haslanger, Jason Stanley, and Robin Celikates (eds.) Rethinking Ideology.
2024. "What is a Black Radical Kantianism without Du Bois? On Method, Principle, and Abolition Democracy," Journal of Social Philosophy 55(1): 6-24.
2024. “Democracy’s Values and Ideals: A Duboisian Defense,” The Monist 107(1): 13-25.
2024. “A Paradigm Shift in Normative Political Theory: Grappling with Mills’s The Racial Contract 25 Years Later,” Editor’s Introduction to a Special Issue in Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy
2024. “American Reconstruction and the Abolition of Second Slavery: On Pascoe’s Intersectional Critique of Kant’s Theory of Labour,” Kantian Review
For more on Dr. Basevich’s work, please visit https://www.elvirabasevich.com/research.html
Education & Affiliations
- Ph.D. in Philosophy, The Graduate Center, CUNY 2017
