Professor Brown’s fields of interest include the history of political theory, nineteenth and twentieth century Continental theory, critical theory and theories of contemporary capitalism. 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.
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 twenty languages. She lectures around the world and has held a number of distinguished visiting fellowships and lectureships. Most recently, she has been a member of the Birkbeck Critical Theory Summer School faculty (2012), a Senior Invited Fellow of the Center for Humanities at Cornell University (2013) and a visiting professor at Columbia University (2014).
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, the problem of the secular, and neoliberalism. She also teaches in the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, an interdisciplinary graduate curriculum, and is an affiliated faculty member of the Rhetoric Department, the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality, and the Designated Emphasis in Early Modern Studies.
