Wendy Brown

Wendy L. Brown (born November 28, 1955) is an American political theorist. She is the UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Previously, she was Class of 1936 First Professor of Political Science and a core faculty member of critical theory at the University of California, Berkeley.

Career

Brown received her BA in economics and politics from UC Santa Cruz, and her M.A and Ph.D. in political philosophy from Princeton University. She taught at Williams College and UC Santa Cruz before taking a position at UC Berkeley in 1999. Beyond her primary teaching roles in Political Theory and Critical Theory there, Brown was also an affiliated faculty member of the Department of Rhetoric, the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality, and the Designated Emphasis in Early Modern Studies.

In 2021, Brown was appointed to the faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study, where she holds the UPS Foundation chair. Brown lectures around the world and has held numerous visiting and honorary positions, including at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, the Goethe University in Frankfurt, the UC Humanities Research Institute in Irvine, the Institute for the Humanities Critical Theory Summer School at Birkbeck, University of London (2012, 2015), a Senior Invited Fellow of the Center for Humanities at Cornell University (2013), a visiting professor at Columbia University (2014), a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Lecturer (2014), a visiting professor of Law and Government at Cornell University (2015), the Shimizu Visiting professor of law at the London School of Economics (2015), and a visiting professor at the European Graduate School (2016).

Among the honorary lectures Brown has delivered are the Beaverbrook Annual Lecture at McGill University (2015); the Pembroke Center keynote at Brown University (2015); a keynote at the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility (2016); the fourth "Democracy Lecture" – following Thomas Piketty, Naomi Klein, and Paul Mason – in the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin (2017); a plenary speech at the European Sociological Association conference in Athens (2017); the Gauss Lecture at Princeton University (2018); and the Wellek Lectures at UC Irvine (2018), which were published as In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (2019). In 2019, Brown delivered The Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Yale University, titled "Politics and Knowledge in Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber."

Brown's work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has received many awards. Brown served as Council Member of the American Political Science Association (2007–09) and as Chair of the UC Humanities Research Institute Board of Governors (2009–11).