Isak Tranvik

Recent and upcoming courses

Spring 2025

• PRSP 301: Perspectives: Educational Philosophy and Planning
• SSCI 411: Theory and Social Problems: TREC

Fall 2025

• PRSP 499: Capstone

Biography

Isak Tranvik is an assistant professor of Individualized and Interdisciplinary Studies at Metro State University. He is also the Faculty Coordinator for TREC (Transformation and Re-entry through Education and Community). He currently teaches courses at Metro State's Saint Paul campus as well its TREC 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.