My dissertation tracks the contours of postwar regimes of American capital punishment as a dual history of politics and technology. Most scholarly accounts, largely confined to the spheres of criminology and sociology, situate the adoption of lethal injection as the de facto mode of capital punishment in the United States inside theories of "biopolitics" and "medicalization" that ultimately eschew historical specificity, even while the resurgence of execution itself is rendered legible in the context of the 1970s political order — the failure of liberal psychiatry, the diminished role of the state in the neoliberal imagination, deinstitutionalization, etc. My research aims to historicize the rise of lethal injection inside the larger anxieties that animated lawmakers and liberal intellectuals alike in the postwar era, and which subsequently produced the conditions necessary for lethal injection to become politically possible in the broader project of American state-making.
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