I'm a Postdoctoral Fellow in the University of British Columbia's Political Science department. My research is about slavery, racism and empire. I completed my PhD in August 2025 at Princeton University. 

My book project Reason for Slavery: Social Science in Antebellum Proslavery Thought revisits the intellectual history of Antebellum slavery after recent debates about slavery and capitalism. The book looks at how a faction of white Southerners appealed to the fledgling social sciences to defend slavery, and tried to develop more impersonal, state-backed, and scientific modes of power to make bondage permanent.

I have published in The European Journal of Political Theory and The Journal of Political Ideologies, as well as popular outlets such as Jacobin.

At Princeton, I was a Social Sciences Prize Fellow (2024-5), and also organized the Racial Capitalism and Conservative Critiques of Capitalism Conferences. Before Princeton, I studied at the University of Toronto and McGill.

My email is tristan.hughes@ubc.ca, and here is my Google Scholar page.