Wendy Brown

Previously, she was Class of 1936 First Professor of Political Science and a core faculty member in The Program for Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley.

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.

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.

Before she took a position at UC Berkeley in 1999, Brown taught at Williams College and UC Santa Cruz.

At Berkeley, beyond her primary teaching roles in Political Theory and Critical Theory, 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 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).

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).

In 2012, her book Walled States, Waning Sovereignty won the David Eastman Award.

Brown has appeared in documentary films, including "The Value of the Humanities" (2014), Take Your Pills (2018), and "What is Democracy?"

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).

Brown received the 2016 Distinguished Teaching Award, UC Berkeley's most prestigious honor for teaching.

In 2017, her book Undoing the Demos won the Spitz Prize for the best book in liberal and/or democratic theory.

She received a UC Presidents Humanities Research Fellowship (2017–18) and was a Guggenheim Fellow (2017–18).

In 2021 Brown received The Berkeley Citation, UC Berkeley's highest honor, for individuals who "go beyond the call of duty and whose achievements exceed the standards of excellence in their fields."

Brown's thinking on the decline of sovereignty and the hollowing out of democracy has found popular and journalistic audiences, with discussions of her work appearing in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian.

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.

(directed by Astra Taylor, 2019).

Together with Michel Feher, Brown is co-editor of the Zone Books' series Near Futures and its digital supplement Near Futures Online.

Brown has established new paradigms in critical legal studies and feminist theory.

She has produced a body of work drawing from Karl Marx's critique of capitalism and its relation to religion and secularism, Friedrich Nietzsche's usefulness for thinking about power and the ruses of morality, Max Weber on the modern organization of power, psychoanalysis and its implications for political identification, Michel Foucault's work on governmentality and neoliberalism, as well as other contemporary continental philosophers.

Bringing these resources together with her own thinking on a range of topics, Brown's work aims to diagnose modern and contemporary formations of political power, and to discern the threats to democracy entailed by such formations.

In this work Brown asks how a sense of woundedness can become the basis for individual and collective forms of identity.

From outlawing hate speech to banning pornography, Brown argues, well-intentioned attempts at protection can legitimize the state while harming subjects by codifying their identities as helpless or in need of continuous governmental regulation.

While breaking ground in political theory, this work also represents one of Brown's key interventions in feminist and queer theory.

The book offers a novel account of legal and political power as constitutive of norms of sexuality and gender.

Through the concept of "wounded attachments", Brown contends that psychic injury may accompany and sustain racial, ethnic, and gender categories, particularly in relation to state law and discursive formations.

In this and other works Brown has criticized representatives of second wave feminism, such as Catharine MacKinnon, for re-inscribing the category of "woman" as an essentialized identity premised on injury.

This book comprises a series of essays on contemporary political issues from the problem of moralism in politics to the legacies of past injustices in the present.

Throughout her thematically overlapping chapters, Brown asks: "What happens to left and liberal political orientations when faith in progress is broken, when both the sovereign individual and sovereign states seem tenuous, when desire seems as likely to seek punishment as freedom, when all political conviction is revealed as contingent and subjective?"

Much of this book takes history and liberalism themselves as objects of theoretical reflection and sites of contestation.

Drawing on a range of thinkers, such as Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, Spinoza, Benjamin and Derrida, Brown rethinks the disorientation and possibility inherent to contemporary democracy.

This work consists of seven articles responding to particular occasions, each of which "mimic, in certain ways, the experience of the political realm: one is challenged to think here, now, about a problem that is set and framed by someone else, and to do so before a particular audience or in dialogue with others not of one's own choosing."

Each individual essay begins with a specific problem: what is the relationship between love, loyalty, and dissent in contemporary American political life?; how did neoliberal rationality become a form of governmentality?; what are the main problems of women's studies programs?; and so on.

According to Brown, the essays do not aim to definitively answer the given questions but "to critically interrogate the framing and naming practices, challenge the dogmas (including those of the Left and of feminism), and discern the constitutive powers shaping the problem at hand."

In this book, Brown subverts the usual and widely accepted notion that tolerance is one of the most remarkable achievements of Western modernity.

She suggests that tolerance (or toleration) cannot be perceived as the complete opposite to violence.

At times, it can also be used to justify violence.