Wendy Brown APSA Candidate Statement

Career and Accomplishments

Wendy Brown is professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is also affiliated with the interdisciplinary graduate programs in Critical Theory and in Women, Gender and Sexuality.  Her Ph.D in Political Philosophy is from Princeton University, and her bachelor’s degree, in economics and politics, is from the University of California, Santa Cruz.  She has held visiting appointments at the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, the Goethe University in Frankfurt, and the Humanities Research Institute in Irvine.  She is the recipient of a distinguished teaching award and numerous fellowships, including awards from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Ford Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the American Association of University Women.

Brown is the author of Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton, 2006), Edgework (Princeton, 2005), Left Legalism/Left Critique, co-edited with Janet Halley (Duke, 2002),  Politics Out of History (Princeton, 2001), States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, 1995), and Manhood and Politics: A Feminist Reading in Political Theory (Rowman and Littlefield, 1988).   Selected ensembles of her recent essays are also forthcoming as books in French, Greek, Bulgarian, and Swedish.  Her articles appear in journals and anthologies in the fields of political science, law, literature, cultural theory, and feminist theory.

For the American Political Science Association, Brown has served on the Professional Ethics and Freedoms Committee, as annual meeting program chair for the Normative Political Theory section, and on selection committees for the Victoria Shuck book award and the David Easton book award.  She was a founding member of the LGBT Caucus and has been its program chair.  Among the many editorial boards on which she currently serves are two political science journals, Polity and Political Research Quarterly.  She is also on the executive editorial board of Political Theory, the executive council of the Foundations of Political Theory section, and she was a founding board member of Theory and Event.

Statement of Views

As an APSA council member, I would be committed to diversifying approaches to the study of politics, internationalizing the worldview of political science, and developing productive connections between political science and other disciplines.  I am also concerned about the standing of women and scholars of color in the profession, incursions against academic freedom from any direction, and curtailing the imaginations of young scholars as they struggle to comport with narrow professional norms.