Aaron Benanav
Aaron Benanav is a Harper-Schmidt Fellow, a Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences Division, and an affiliate faculty member in the Department of History at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on the history of unemployment, as both a statistical category and as a lived, socio-economic reality, with articles forthcoming in the Journal of Global History and Social Science History. Professor Benanav is currently working on two books related to these interests. One examines the postwar efforts of UN officials to extent the reach of unemployment, as a category, from Europe and the United States to the post-colonial world. The other tells the story of the rise in global surplus populations that ultimately undermined those efforts, by producing forms of underemployment that were difficult to categorize. He is also interested in criticizing contemporary accounts of a coming age of technological automation and exploring perspectives on what a post-scarcity world might look like.
Neil Brenner
Neil Brenner is Professor of Urban Theory at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). His writing and teaching focus on the theoretical, conceptual and methodological dimensions of urban questions. His work builds upon, and seeks to extend, the fields of critical urban and regional studies, comparative geopolitical economy and critical sociospatial theory. Brenner’s most recent books are New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question(New York: Oxford University Press, 2019);Critique of Urbanization: Selected Essays (Basel: Bauwelt Fundamente Series, Birkhäuser Verlag, 2016); and the edited volume, Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization (Berlin: Jovis, 2014). He studied under Moishe Postone's mentorship at the University of Chicago in the 1990s (Ph.D., political science, 1999), where he was an active participant in the Social Theory Workshop.
Craig Calhoun
Craig Calhoun is University Professor of Social Sciences at ASU. His research addresses social movements, democracy, and the relationship of political economy and technology to culture, society, and the effort to achieve sustainable futures. Calhoun’s books include: Neither Gods Nor Emperors: Students and the Struggle for Democracy in China; Nations Matter: Citizenship, Solidarity, and the Cosmopolitan Dream; The Roots of Radicalism; and Does Capitalism Have a Future? They have been translated into 21 languages. Previously, he was Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and President of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC).
Jean Comaroff
Jean Comaroff is the Alfred North Whitehead Professor of African and African American Studies and Anthropology at Harvard University, and Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town. She was educated at the University of Cape Town and the London School of Economics. Until 2012, she was the Bernard E. and Ellen C. Sunny Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology, and Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory. Her research, primarily conducted in southern Africa, has focused on the interplay of capitalism, modernity, and colonialism, the politics of knowledge and the nature of sovereignty, and theorizing the contemporary world from beyond its centers. Her writing has covered a range of more specific topics: religion and ritual, medicine and magic, law, and crime, democracy and difference. Publications include Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: the Culture and History of a South African People (1985), “Beyond the Politics of Bare Life: AIDS and the Global Order” (2007); and, with John L. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution (vols. l [1991] and ll [1997]); Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (1992); Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism (2000), Law and Disorder in the Postcolony (2006), Ethnicity, Inc. (2009),Theory from the South, or How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa (2011), The Truth About Crime: Sovereignty, Knowledge, Social Order (2016) and The Politics of Custom: Chiefship, Capital, and the State in Contemporary Africa (2018).
John Comaroff
John Comaroff is Hugh K. Foster Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology, and an Oppenheimer Research Fellow, at Harvard University. His authored and edited books include, with Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution (2 vols), Ethnography and the Historical Imagination, Modernity and its Malcontents, Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa, Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism, Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, Ethnicity, Inc., Zombi“s et fronti“res à ère neoliberale, Theory from the South: or, how Euro-America is evolving toward Africa, The Truth about Crime, and The Politics of Custom: Chiefship, Capital, and the State in Contemporary Africa.
Geoff Eley
GEOFF ELEY is Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Michigan, where he has taught since 1979. He previously taught at the University of Cambridge (1975-79). Trained originally as a modern German historian, he also works in modern British history, as well as on a general European front. He is interested in both the history of the Left and the history of the Right; history and film; historiography; and history and theory. He has recently begun teaching a large new undergraduate course on the History of Terrorism. His earliest works were Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck (1980, 1991) and (with David Blackbourn) The Peculiarities of German History (1980, 1984). More recent books include Forging Democracy: A History of the Left in Europe. 1850-2000 (2002); A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (2005); (with Keith Nield) The Future of Class in History (2007); and Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology, and the Ground of Consent in Germany, 1930-1945 (2013). He is coeditor of German Colonialism in a Global Age (2014), and German Modernities from Wilhelm to Weimar: A Contest of Futures (2016). He is writing a general history of Europe in the twentieth century and a new study of the German Right, Genealogies of Nazism: Conservatives, Radical Nationalists, Fascists in Germany, 1860-1930
Nancy Fraser
Nancy Fraser is an American critical theorist, feminist, and the Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social Science and professor of philosophy at The New School in New York City. Widely known for her critique of identity politics and her philosophical work on the concept of justice, Fraser is also a staunch critic of contemporary liberal feminism and its abandonment of social justice issues. Fraser holds honorary doctoral degrees from four universities in three countries, and won the 2010 Alfred Schutz Prize in Social Philosophy from the American Philosophical Association. She is President of the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division.
Robert Hullot-Kentor
Robert Hullot-Kentor is the retired chair of the MA program in Critical Theory and the Arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Formerly, he taught at Harvard and Stanford Universities. He has written widely on the work of T. W. Adorno—collected in Things Beyond Resemblance—and translated Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, Philosophy of New Music, as well as reconstructed Adorno’s unfinished manuscript, Current of Music, for the Adorno Archiv in Frankfurt. A new collection of essays will be titled A New Type of Human Being and Who We Really Are.
Martin Jay
Martin Jay is Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught Modern European Intellectual History and Critical Theory. Among his works are The Dialectical Imagination (1973 and 1996), Marxism and Totality (l984); Adorno (1984); Permanent Exiles (1985), Fin-de-siècle Socialism (1989); Force Fields (1993); Downcast Eyes (1993); Cultural Semantics (1998); Refractions of Violence (2004); Songs of Experience (2005); The Virtues of Mendacity (2010), Essays from the Edge (2011); Kracauer: l’exilé (2014); and Reason After its Eclipse (2016).
Stacie Kent
Stacie Kent is an Assistant Professor in History and International Studies at Boston College. Her research and teaching focus on global capitalism in imperial and post-colonial contexts. Trained in history and social theory at the University of Chicago, her work connects the temporal rhythms, expansionist needs, and spatial integration of capitalist reproduction to governance and work regimes in East and Southeast Asia.
Ben Lee
Ben Lee is a Professor of Anthropology and Philosophy at the New School. Formerly, he was Dean of the Graduate Faculty and Provost. Lee's main claim to fame is his involvement in bringing Moishe Postone to Chicago to the Center for Psychosocial Studies in 1983.
Edward Lipuma
Edward LiPuma is a University Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, at the University of Miami. He is the coauthor, with Benjamin Lee, of Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk. He is also the author of Encompassing Others: The Magic of Modernity in Melanesia; The Gift of Kinship, and most recently The Social Life of Financial Derivatives (2017). He is currently working on a book on the interface between social economy and artistry of winemaking in Piedmont, Italy, and a novel that centers on the dimensions of the ethnographic experience that lies beyond the limits of scientific discourse.
Robert Meister
Robert Meister is 3CT’s visiting scholar. A professor of social and political thought in the department of the History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, Meister’s research interests include political and moral philosophy, law and social theory, Marxian theory, institutional analysis, and financialization. His most recent book is After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights(Columbia University Press, 2011). His essay, “Liquidity”, in Derivatives and Wealth of Society (University of Chicago Press, 2016) will be part of his next book, tentatively titled Historical Justice in the Age of Finance.
Patrick Murray
Patrick Murray is professor of philosophy and the John C. Kenefick Faculty Chair in the Humanities at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. He is the author of The Mismeasure of Wealth: Essays on Marx and Social Form (Brill, 2016; Haymarket, 2017) and Marx’s Theory of Scientific Knowledge (Humanities 1988) and the editor of Reflections on Commercial Life: An Anthology of Classic Text from Plato to the Present (Routledge, 1997). He is working Capital’s Reach: How Capital Shapes and Subsumes. Jeanne Schuler and he are completing a jointly authored book, False Moves: Basic Problems with Factoring Philosophy. He is one of the original members of the International Symposium on Marxian Theory (ISMT). His research interests center on the relationship between capitalism and modern philosophy and include the British empiricists, Hegel, Marx, and the Frankfurt School.
Viren Murthy
Viren Murthy teaches transnational Asian History and researches Chinese and Japaneseintellectual history in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan: The Resistance of Consciousness (Brill, 2011) and co-editor with Joyce Liu of Marxisms in East Asia
(Routledge, 2017), co-editor with Fabian Schäfer and Max Ward, of Confronting Capital and Empire: Rethinking Kyoto School Philosophy (Brill, 2017) co-editor with Axel Schneider of The Challenge of Linear Time: Nationhood and the Politics of History in East Asia (Brill, 2013), and co-editor with Prasenjit Duara and Andrew Sartori of A Companion to Global Historical Thought, (Blackwell, 2014). He has published articles in Modern Intellectual History, Modern China, Frontiers of History in China and Positions: Asia Critique and is currently working on a project tentatively entitled: Pan-Asianism and the Conundrums of Post-colonial Modernity.
Eric Santner
Eric L. Santner is the Philip and Ida Romberg Distinguished Service Professor in Modern Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago. He came to Chicago in 1996 after twelve years of teaching at Princeton University. He has been a visiting fellow at various institutions, including Dartmouth, Washington University, Cornell, and the University of Konstanz. He works at the intersection of literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, political theory, and religious thought. His books include: Friedrich Hölderlin: Narrative Vigilance and the Poetic Imagination; Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany; My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber's Secret History of Modernity; On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig; On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald; The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (with Slavoj Zizek and Kenneth Reinhard); The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty. He edited the German Library Series volume of works by Friedrich Hölderlin and co-edited with Moishe Postone, Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century. His work has been translated into German, Spanish, French, Korean, Hebrew, Polish, Italian, and Portuguese. Eric Santner delivered the Tanner Lectures in Human Values at UC Berkeley in the spring of 2014; they appeared in 2015 with Oxford University Press under the title, The Weight of All Flesh: On the Subject-Matter of Political Theology. His co-authored book (with William Mazzarella and Aaron Schuster), Sovereignty, Inc.: Three Essays on Authority and Enjoyment, will appear in the Trios series at University of Chicago Press in 2019.
Andrew Sartori
Andrew Sartori is professor of history at New York University. He is the author of Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital (University of Chicago Press, 2008) and Liberalism in Empire: An Alternative History (University of California Press, 2014). He has coedited several volumes, including Global Intellectual History (Columbia University Press, 2013) with Samuel Moyn. He is also the co-editor of the journal, Critical Historical Studies.
Andrew Sloin
Andrew Sloin is an Associate Professor at Baruch College, where he teaches Russian, Soviet, and Jewish history. His first book, The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power (Indiana University Press, 2017), received the 2018 Dorothy Rosenberg Prize from the American Historical Association. He is currently working on his second book, Troubled Time: Socialism and the Yiddish Historical Imagination, 1871-1948, which examines the relationship between the development of Socialism and the reimagining of popular Jewish history in the transnational Yiddish public sphere.
Eli Zaretsky
Eli Zaretsky is Professor of History at The New School for Social Research. He has taught at Lang College since 1999. His interests are in twentieth century cultural history, the theory and history of capitalism (especially its social and cultural dimensions), and the history of the family. His most recent book is Political Freud, published in 2015 by Cambridge University Press. His earlier work includes Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis and Why America Needs a Left. He is the editor of The Polish Peasant in Europe and America; and of Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life.
