We are pleased to invite you to the first lecture of the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2025/26 Spring semester!
Dean Caivano
(Lehigh University)
“Who’s Afraid of the Necro-President? Sovereignty, Spectacle, and Political Authority in Decline”
Thursday, March 12, 2026
at 4:45 p.m.
You can get 3 OZN points for participating in this event.
Where?
Dobra 55, room 2.118
(the building features some mobility accommodations: ramp and lift)
What?
Across contemporary democracies, public discourse is saturated with claims of institutional decay, civilizational crisis, democratic erosion, and the resurgence of fascist currents, yet executive power has intensified rather than receded. In the United States, immigration raids conducted by ICE are framed as acts of purification; police killings circulate within narratives of order and disorder; imperial ambitions reappear in gestures toward acquiring Greenland or extending influence over Canada; confrontations with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and renewed threats to bomb Iran are justified through the language of security, economic benefit, and national survival. Across these domains, force functions as governance itself, a visible demonstration of authority’s command. These developments signal a transformation in sovereignty. The presidency no longer coheres primarily as a symbol of civic vitality or constitutional continuity; legitimacy increasingly derives from staging emergencies, amplifying threats, and projecting power across and within borders. Crisis persists as continuous rather than exceptional, and the exercise of violence becomes evidence that leadership remains necessary. To make sense of this transformation, this talk develops the concept of the necro-president as a diagnostic lens for understanding how executive authority reorganizes itself under conditions of political decline. The necro-president is a presidency saturated with death, where authority stabilizes itself less by promising renewal than by persuading citizens that survival depends on domination, hardening democracy into a form organized around permanent emergency and death as a political resource.
Who?
Dean Caivano is a political theorist and assistant professor of political science at Lehigh University (USA). His work focuses on sovereignty, executive power, radical democracy, and the symbolic structure of political authority. He is the author of The Necro-President: Trump, MAGA, and the Decline of the American Republic (Springer, 2025), A Politics of All: Thomas Jefferson and Radical Democracy (Lexington Books, 2022), and The Sublime of the Political: Narrative & Autoethnography as Theory (transcript Verlag/Columbia University Press, 2021). He is currently completing a new book project, Hollow Sovereignty: Institutional Decay and the Rise of Necrocracy, which examines the transformation of sovereign power amid democratic decline.
