Darren Yau is a doctoral candidate in the Religion Department (Religion, Ethics, and Politics) and Program in Political Philosophy at Princeton University. His research draws on thinkers from the modern to contemporary period to examine questions about justice and social reform, with particular interest in how religious commitments shape and are shaped by debates in political and social theory. His dissertation uses Martin Luther King Jr.’s political theology of nonviolence to explore the grounds, limits, and objections to nonviolent direct action in democratic social movements under unjust background conditions. His additional projects concern Marxist accounts of racism and religion, the role of religious institutions in distributive justice, pacifist arguments about global justice, and other philosophical questions that arise at the nexus of religion, race, and politics.

Darren’s research has been supported by the Center for the Study of Culture, Society, and Religion, the Department of African American Studies, and the Effron Center for the Study of America. He is currently a Laurence S. Rockefeller Graduate Prize Fellow at the University Center for Human Values.

He holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Wheaton College.