Wendy L. Brown

Wendy Brown is the UPS Foundation Chair in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study. Brown is a political theorist concerned with contemporary political challenges, from the future of democracy to the future of the planet. 

Drawing from Nietzschean, Weberian, Marxist, Foucauldian, feminist and postcolonial angles of vision, Brown theorizes the subterranean powers shaping contemporary EuroAtlantic polities, with particular attention to the political identities, subjectivities and expressions they spawn. She is the author/co-author of a dozen books. The most recent include In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (2019) and Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber (forthcoming 2023) Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages. 

Prior to her appointment at the Institute, Brown was Class of 1936 First Chair at the University of California, Berkeley where she taught in Political Science and Critical Theory.  She received her BA in Economics and Politics from UC Santa Cruz and her PhD in Political Philosophy from Princeton University.