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Isak Tranvik

  • Assistant Professor

Credentials

  • Doctor of Philosophy, Political Science
    Duke University
  • Master of Arts, Political Science
    Duke University
  • Master of Education, Secondary Education and Teaching
    University Of Missouri-St Louis
  • Bachelor of Arts, Political Science
    Saint Olaf College

Recent and upcoming courses

Fall 2024

Spring 2025

Biography

Isak Tranvik is an assistant professor of Individualized and Interdisciplinary Studies at Metro State University. He currently teaches courses at Metro State's Saint Paul campus as well its TREC (Transformation and Re-entry through Education and Community) campuses at Lino Lakes, Stillwater, and Faribault prisons. His teaching career began in an eighth-grade classroom at Gateway Middle in the St. Louis Public School District. Since then, he has taught courses on democracy and popular politics in a variety of contexts: local community colleges and international research universities, private liberal arts colleges and Catholic migrant shelters, public schools, and state prisons. His writing is similarly wide-ranging: his work on dissent, democratic theory, and religion and politics has appeared or is forthcoming in peer-reviewed journals like Political Theory, Constellations, Perspectives on Politics, and Comparative Political Studies. Tranvik’s teaching and research has been generously supported by the Charlotte Newcombe Foundation, the Ottis Green Foundation, and the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, among others. He is currently working on a book manuscript that examines the ways nonviolence helped construct the modern concept of "religion"—and the ways that the concept of religion remakes what is usually understood as nonviolence.