Wendy Brown b. 1955

Wendy Brown is an American political theorist and UPS Foundation Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, whose work has shaped contemporary critical reflection on neoliberalism, sovereignty, and the political theology of the present. States of Injury and Politics Out of History reframed late-twentieth-century identity politics through a Nietzschean and Foucauldian lens, while Walled States, Waning Sovereignty and Undoing the Demos showed how the apparently strong walls of contemporary nation-states are in fact symptoms of weakening sovereignty under economic globalization. In the Ruins of Neoliberalism extended these analyses into a powerful diagnosis of the rise of authoritarian populism in the wake of forty years of neoliberal hegemony.

Wendy Brown was born in November 1955 in California and grew up in the Bay Area. She took her bachelor's in economics and politics at Princeton in 1977 and her doctorate in political philosophy at Princeton in 1983 with a dissertation on classical political theory and manhood. She taught at Williams and the University of California at Santa Cruz before joining the political science department at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1999, where she held the Class of 1936 First Chair until 2021; she is now UPS Foundation Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Her books include Manhood and Politics (1988), States of Injury (1995), Politics Out of History (2001), Edgework (2005), Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (2006), Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (2010), Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution (2015), In the Ruins of Neoliberalism (2019), and Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber (2023).

Brown reads contemporary politics through Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault, and the Frankfurt School, tracing how neoliberal rationality reshapes citizens into entrepreneurial subjects, hollowing out democratic self-rule from within; her studies of tolerance, the wall, and 'states of injury' show how juridical liberal remedies can entrench the wounds they were meant to heal. She is one of the most widely read political theorists of her generation.