Ella C. Street

Her research is concerned with democratic judgment, popular participation, political identity and theatrical politics in the history of political thought and practice. Her first book project, When Citizens Judge, compares how citizens judged as leisured spectators in the theater and as jurors in the popular courts of 5th and 4th century democratic Athens. A new project, Actors on the Political Stage, develops a genealogy of theater metaphors in political thought and practice—from ancient Athens to Puritan New England—to illuminate contemporary “post-truth” and performative politics. Her work has appeared in the Review of Politics and the Tocqueville Review.

Ella has taught political thought and intellectual history at Cornell University, Colorado College, Georgetown University, and the University of Toronto. She earned her B.A. in Political Science from Colorado College, M.A. in Government from Georgetown University, and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Toronto. From 2021-2023, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Government at Cornell University.