The Leo Strauss Award is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor the best doctoral dissertation in political philosophy.
Citation from the Award Committee:
The Leo Strauss Award Committee is honored to recognize Temporalities of Struggle: Beginning and Belonging in the African Socialist Tradition, by David Suell, as the 2026 recipient. This dissertation makes a genuine contribution to the field, bringing sustained theoretical attention to the rich tradition of African socialist thought and expanding the canon by taking seriously Africanist thinkers at the height of liberation movements across the continent. Through clear and powerful writing, Suell reads the writings and speeches of Julius Nyerere, Amílcar Cabral, Kwame Nkrumah, Frantz Fanon, and Ọbafẹ́mi Awólọ́wọ̀ alongside Maasai resistance struggles and the dramatic works of Wole Soyinka, showing how African socialist thinkers understood their fights for freedom as “fights over time”: interpreting pre-colonial and colonial pasts, asserting agency in chaotic presents, and imagining emancipated futures. The dissertation analyzes how the concept of time was deployed in colonial and anti-colonial politics, unpacking “African socialism” beyond its Cold War framing and tracing how competing accounts of time define the scope and purpose of political community. Working in conversation with a generation of Black and Indigenous political theorists, it speaks to enduring questions about the construction of history and its entanglement with power, while offering theoretical leverage for further subfields, from environmental to feminist political thought. The committee was especially struck by the imaginative use of drama as a source of political theory, by a comparative sensibility that genuinely illuminates, and by a conclusion that reaches toward the political questions of our own moment—the mark of a mature scholar. As a work of recovery, comparison, and theoretical invention, it stands on its own and is a distinguished addition to the works this award honors.
David Suell is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Eastern Michigan University, where he teaches and advises students in political theory and international affairs. David also serves as faculty affiliate for Eastern’s Center for Civil Rights and Social Justice and as Managing Editor at Contemporary Political Theory. He earned his PhD in Political Science from the University of Michigan in 2024. David’s work primarily draws on 20th Century African political thought to investigate two questions: first, how do political thinkers in dire conditions contest the boundaries of what is politically possible and desirable, and, second, how do those projects that aimed to overcome colonialism and racial capitalism offer viable strategies and ideals for the present? Beyond his research, David takes these questions as a starting point to help students apply a global and historical lens to interrogate their own and others’ ideas, material conditions, and paths forward. David is currently working on components of two book projects—one based upon his dissertation, and another that reads African nationalist thinkers as interlocutors with W.E.B. DuBois to theorize their projects as global experiments in “abolition democracy.”
APSA thanks the committee members for their service: Jennet Kirkpatrick (Chair) of Arizona State University, Jasmine Yarish of the University of the District of Columbia, and Mark Lutz of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas
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