Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science, UC Berkeley

Professor Brown's fields of interest include the history of political theory, nineteenth and twentieth century Continental theory, critical theory, and cultural theory (including feminist theory, critical race theory, and postcolonial theory). She is best known for intertwining the insights of Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Frankfurt School theorists, Foucault, and contemporary Continental philosophers to critically interrogate formations of power, political identity, citizenship, and political subjectivity in contemporary liberal democracies. Brown's current research concerns the relation of religion, secularism and capital in Marx's work along with the novel predicaments of democratic citizenship in contemporary neoliberal governmentality.

Professor Brown received her Ph.D in Political Philosophy from Princeton University in 1983. Prior to coming to Berkeley in 1999, she taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz and at Williams College. Her work has been translated into more than 15 languages. She lectures around the world, has held a number of distinguished visiting lectureships, and has recently been a Senior Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and a UC President's Humanities Fellow.

In the Political Science Department, Professor Brown offers undergraduate courses on early modern and modern European political theory and on political freedom. She offers graduate courses in the history of European political thought and on contemporary problems in political theory drawn from her own research, including, in recent years, sovereignty, critique, humanism, the autonomy of the political, and the problem of the secular. She also teaches in the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, an interdisciplinary graduate curriculum.