Adriana Alfaro Altamirano (PhD, Harvard) is Assistant Professor of Political Theory at ITAM, in Mexico City. Her research explores questions regarding power, law, and agency as they appear in modern and contemporary political thought, from a comparative perspective. She is particularly interested in how our subjectivity—both individual and collective—is shaped by language, habit, reason, and emotion in different social, political, and legal circumstances.

Currently, she is working in two projects. The first, titled Emotions, Language, and Human Agency in the Law, explores the role of various metaphors and symbols in criminal law, especially as it is practiced in Mexico; it also studies the conception of human agency behind key legal doctrines of civil law systems; and finally, it proposes a new way of thinking about judicial empathy and its role in judging. Further, her project titled Narrative Identities, Discourse, and the Self explores the way in which political identities are created and transformed through narrative and discourse.

She is the author of The Belief in Intuition: Individuality and Authority in Henri Bergson and Max Scheler (Penn Press 2021).