Wendy Brown papers (MS.2024.024)

Biographical/Historical Note

Wendy Brown is a distinguished American political theorist and Professor Emerita of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Brown received her PhD in Political Philosophy from Princeton University in 1983. She taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Williams College, and then at Berkeley in 1999. Brown's fields of interest include the history of political theory, feminist theory, contemporary critical theories of law, nineteenth and twentieth century Continental theory, and contemporary American political culture. She is best known for intertwining the insights of Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Frankfurt School theorists, Foucault, and contemporary Continental philosophers to critically interrogate formations of power, political identity, citizenship, and political subjectivity in contemporary liberal democracies. Her scholarship has focused on neoliberalism and the political formations related to it. Some of her influential publications include States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, 1995), Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton 2006), Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (Zone, 2010), Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution (Zone, 2015) and In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Anti-Democratic Politics in the West (Columbia University Press 2019). Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages. She lectures around the world and has held a number of distinguished fellowships and visiting professorships, most recently at Columbia University, Cornell University, University of London at Birkbeck, and the London School of Economics. In 2017-18 she was a Simon Guggenheim Fellow and UC Presidents Humanities Research Fellow. In 2021-22, she was Visiting Distinguished Professor in the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. In 2021, she was awarded Berkeley's highest honor--the Berkeley Citation, awarded to "distinguished individuals or organizations, academic or nonacademic, whose contributions to UC Berkeley go beyond the call of duty and whose achievements exceed the standards of excellence in their fields."

This note was modified from Brown's professional bio page at https://polisci.berkeley.edu/150w/wendy-brown in 2024