Dr. Caivano’s research focuses on radical democracy and emancipatory politics, with particular attention to how these concepts intersect with contemporary political imaginaries, social movements, and institutional decline. His work critically engages democratic theory, abolitionist thought, and political aesthetics to examine how political practices unsettle dominant frameworks of power, justice, and visibility.
He is the author of The Necro-President: Trump, MAGA, and the Decline of the American Republic (Springer, 2025), which introduces the figure of the necro-president to theorize the American presidency as a site of symbolic death, institutional decay, and authoritarian endurance. His current projects include Frames for Abolition, a book that blends political theory, abolitionist pedagogy, and photography to examine the visual grammar of carcerality; and The Necrocracy: Sovereignty, Death, and the Future of Rule, which theorizes sovereignty as a decaying, spectral form of endurance beyond legitimacy or law.
He is also the author of A Politics of All: Thomas Jefferson and Radical Democracy (Lexington Books 2022), co-author of The Sublime of the Political: Narrative & Autoethnography as Theory (transcript Verlag & Columbia University Press, 2021) and editor of No Escape: Excavating the Multidimensional Phenomenon of Fear (Brill, 2016). His scholarly articles have appeared in Philosophy & Social Criticism, SPECTRA, New Political Science, and the Journal of Narrative Politics, amongst others.