Rate My Professor William Connolly

William Connolly was an influential political scientist who began his academic career as Assistant Professor of Political Science at Ohio University from 1965 to 1968. He earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan-Flint and a PhD from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Following his time at Ohio University, Connolly joined the faculty at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, from 1969 to 1985, rising to the rank of full professor. In 1985, he moved to Johns Hopkins University, where he chaired the Department of Political Science from 1996 to 2002, was appointed Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science in 2003, and became professor emeritus in January 2024. He held prestigious fellowships, including at Nuffield College, Oxford; the Institute for Advanced Study; the Stanford Center for Behavioral Studies; and as a Leverhulme scholar at Exeter College.

Connolly specialized in political theory, with research interests spanning democratic theory, pluralism, secularism, global capitalism, fascism, climate change, ideology and political economy, language, and identity. He authored or edited more than 20 books and numerous articles, including The Terms of Political Discourse (1993, Benjamin Evans Lippincott Award 1999), Identity, Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (2002), Why I Am Not a Secularist (1999), The Ethos of Pluralization (1995), Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (2002), Pluralism (2005), Capitalism and Christianity, American Style (2008), A World of Becoming (2011), The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism (2013), Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming (2017), Aspirational Fascism: The Struggle for Multifaceted Democracy Under Trumpism (2017), Climate Machines, Fascist Drives, and Truth (2019), and Resounding Events: Adventures of an Academic from the Working Class (2022, co-winner of the APSA David Easton Award 2023). His scholarship reshaped political theory by challenging traditional canons, fostering transdisciplinary dialogues across economics, neuroscience, and more, and influencing debates on pluralism, democracy, capitalism, and climate issues. Connolly chaired over 80 dissertation committees, many producing leaders in transdisciplinary thought, received the International Studies Association Distinguished Scholar Award in 2017, ranked fourth most influential political theorist in a 2010 poll, and had the Western Political Science Association's annual best paper award named in his honor in 2020. He co-moderated the blog The Contemporary Condition from 2010.