Dr. Amy Gais is a political theorist specializing in political freedom, specifically the question of how individuals resist and confront oppression.
Dr. Gais is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science and Comparative Literature and Thought at Washington University in St. Louis. Previously, Dr. Gais was a Modeling Interdisciplinary Inquiry Postdoctoral Fellow at the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities at WUSTL. Dr. Gais received her Ph.D. in Political Science with Distinction from Yale University, where she was the recipient of the Robert C. Wood Prize and an American Council of Learned Societies Emerging Voices finalist, and her M.A. from University of Chicago. She is the author of The Coerced Conscience (Cambridge University Press, 2024). She is working on a second book project on freedom and dissimulation in African American political thought, Freedom, Dissimulation, and Resistance in African American Political Thought. Her work has been published by Political Theory, Review of Politics, and History of European Ideas, and funded by the Andrew J. Mellon Foundation and the Beinecke Rare Books & Manuscripts Library.