Rate My Professor Wendy Brown

Wendy Brown is the UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study. A political theorist, she works across the history of political thought, political economy, Continental philosophy, cultural theory, and critical legal theory. Brown investigates the subterranean powers shaping contemporary Euroatlantic polities, with particular attention to the political identities, subjectivities, and expressions they spawn. Prior to her appointment at the Institute in 2021, she was the Class of 1936 First Chair at the University of California, Berkeley, where she served as a prize-winning teacher and scholar and is now Professor Emerita of Political Science.

Born and raised in California’s Central Valley, Brown received her BA in Economics and Politics from UC Santa Cruz and her PhD in Political Philosophy from Princeton University in 1983. She is the author or co-author of a dozen books, including States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (1995), Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (2006), Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (2010), Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (2015), and In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (2019). Her work, translated into more than twenty languages, has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and others. Brown has held visiting professorships and fellowships at institutions including Cornell, Columbia, Duke, the London School of Economics, and the University of Witwatersrand. She is currently exploring how political freedom can be reformulated in light of regimes of class, race, and gender subjection and the climate crisis, and she is extending her 2019 Yale Tanner Lectures on politics and knowledge in nihilistic times.