MIR hub faculty

[* also Executive Committee Member]

Sharad Chari

Sharad Chari is an Associate Professor of Geography and Co-Director of Critical Theory at UC Berkeley. He is the author of Apartheid Remains (Duke, 2024, open access), Gramsci at Sea (Minnesota, 2023) and Fraternal Capital (Stanford, 2004), and co-editor of Ethnographies of Power (Wits/ NYU, 2022, open access) and, with Samera Esmeir, a special issue of Critical Times on ‘the Anticolonial Impulse.’ He is working on oceanic capitalism in the Southern African Indian Ocean, and, with B. P. Ditsie, a book that bends Black queer life in a critique of sexuality in the new/old South Africa. 

Chris Chen

Chris Chen is a co-founder of the MIR and Associate Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz. He is the author of Literature and Race in the Democracy of Goods (Bloomsbury, 2022), and with co-author Sarika Chandra “Remapping the Race/Class Problematic” in Totality Inside Out: Rethinking Crisis and Conflict Under Capital (Fordham, 2022). With Chandra, he is currently working on a new book about comparative racialization and the value-form.

Charmaine Chua*

Charmaine Chua is a co-founder of the MIR and Assistant Professor of Global Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She is currently writing two books, How to Beat Amazon: The Struggle of America’s New Working Class (co-authored with Spencer Cox), and Fast Circulation, Slow Violence: Logistical Counterrevolution and the Transpacific Empire of Distribution. Among other publications, she is co-editor, with Kai Bosworth, of On the Blockade, a special issue of Antipode (forthcoming), and with Martin Danyluk, Deborah Cowen, and Laleh Khalili, of Turbulent Circulations, a special issue of EPD (2018). 

Joshua Clover*

Joshua Clover is the a co-founder of the MIR and author of seven books, including Riot.Strike.Riot: the New Era of Uprisings, a political economy of social movements, with recent editions in Italian, French, German, Turkish, and Swedish. He is professor of English and Comparative Literature at University of California Davis as well as Affiliated Professor of Literature and Modern Culture at University of Copenhagen. 

Kelly Kay

Kelly Kay is Associate Professor of Geography at UCLA. Her curent book project is tentatively entitled Landscapes of Finance: Time, Timber, and the Fate of US Forest-Dependent Communities. Among other venues, her work has been published in Nature, Climate Change, Progress in Human Geography, Environment and Planning A, Environment and Planning E, Antipode, Geoforum, and the Annals of the American Association of Geographers. 

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Colleen Lye

Colleen Lye is a co-founder of the MIR and Associate Professor of English and Critical Theory at UC Berkeley, and a former co-chair of the Berkeley Faculty Association. Among other volumes, she is the co-editor, with Christopher Nealon, of After Marx: Literature, Theory and Value in the 21st Century (2022) and, with Joseph Cleary and Jed Esty, Peripheral Realisms: a special issue of MLQ (2012). Articles related to her current book-in-progress on Asian American marxism are “Asian American Cultural Critique at the end of US Empire” (2022) and “Identity Politics, Criticism and Self-Criticism” (2020).

Wendy Matsumura*

Wendy Matsumura is Associate Professor of History at UC San Diego. She is the author of , among other works, “Triple Exploitation, Social Reproduction and the Agrarian Question in Japan” (2022); “The Normal and Exceptional Forms of Enclosure in Okinawa” (2018); and The Limits of Okinawa (2015)

Annie McClanahan*

Annie McClanahan is a co-founder of the MIR and an Associate Professor of English at UC Irvine, where she co-directs the Black Studies Cohort and is on the faculty board of UC-LIFTED, a prison education project. She is the author of Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and 21st Century Culture (Stanford, 2017) and is currently working on a new book about service work.

Nick Mitchell

Nick Mitchell is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies as well as Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz. She is the author of, among other works, Discipline and Surplus: Black Studies, Women’s Studies and the Dawn of Neoliberalism (forthcoming), “The View from Nowhere: On Frank Wilderson’s Afropessimism (2020); and, with Abigail Bioggs, Eli Meyerhoff and Zach Schwartz-Weinstein, “Abolitionist University Studies: An Invitation” (2019).

Alfonso Gonzales Toribio

Alfonso Gonzales Toribio is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies and Director of the Latin American Studies program at UC Riverside. He is author of the award-winning Reform without Justice: Latino Migrant Politics and the Homeland Security State (Oxford University Press, 2013) and is currently writing a second book, Dead on Arrival: Mexican and Central American Asylum Claims in the Era of Authoritarian Neoliberalism (Oxford).

Susan Zieger

Susan Zieger is Professor of English at UC Riverside. She is the author, most recently, of The Mediated Mind: Affect, Ephemera and Consumerism in the Nineteenth Century (2018), and the co-editor of The Aesthetic Life of Infrastructure: Race, Affect, Environment (2022) and Assembly Codes: The Logistics of Media (2021).

Advisory Board

Robert Brenner

Robert Brenner is Director of the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History at UCLA. He is the author of, among many books and articles, The Boom and the Bubble (2002); The Economics of Global Turbulence (1998); and “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe” (1976).

Michael Burawoy

Michael Burawoy is Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley, a past president of the American Sociological Association and the International Sociology Association, and a founding editor of the magazine Global Dialogue. He is the author, most recently, of Public Sociology: Between Utopia and Anti-Utopia (2021); Pour un Marxisme Sociologique (with Erik Wright) (2021); and “Walking on Two Legs: Black Marxism and the Sociological Canon” (2022). 

Sarika Chandra

Sarika Chandra is Associate Professor of English at Wayne State University. She is the co-editor with Kevin Floyd and Jen Hedler Philis of Totality Inside Out: Rethinking Crisis and Conflict under Capital (2022). Her current research maps the relationship between race and capitalism.

Nancy Fraser

Nancy Fraser is Henry and Louise A. Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics at the New School for Social Research. Among her many books and articles are, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto (co-authored with Cinzia Arruza and Tithi Bhattacharya) (2019); “Contradictions of Capital and Care” (2016); and Mapping the Radical Imagination: Between Redistribution and Recognition (2003).  

Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics and a Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences and American Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the co-founder of the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance and the Central California Environmental Justice Network. Gilmore is the author of, among many books and articles, Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation (2022) and Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (2007).

Adam Hanieh

Adam Hanieh is Professor of Political Economy and Global Development in the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter. He is also a Research Fellow at the Transnational Institute (tni.org) and a member of the Board of Directors of the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP). His most recent book is Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power and the Making of the World Market (Verso Books, 2024).

Michael Hardt

Michael Hardt is Professor of Literature at Duke University and editor of the South Atlantic Quarterly. He is the co-author with Antonio Negri of the Empire trilogy: Empire (2000), Multitude (2004) and Commonwealth (2009). Their most recent collaboration is Assembly (2017).

Ho-fung Hung

Ho-fung Hung is Henry M. and Elizabeth P. Wiesenfeld Professor in Political Economy at the Sociology Department and Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of The China Boom: Why China Will not Rule the World (2016) and Protest with Chinese Characteristics (2011). 

Rebecca Karl

Rebecca Karl is Professor of History at NYU and a member of Critical China Scholars network. She is the author of, among other works, The Magic of Concepts: History and the Economic in Twentieth Century China (2017) and Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth Century: A Concise History (2010). She is the co-editor and co-translator, with Lydia Liu and Dorothy Ko, of The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory (2013).

Robin D.G. Kelley

Robin D.G. Kelley is Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in US History at UCLA, and a Contributing Editor to Boston Review. Among his many works are Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2002); with Howard Zinn and Dana Frank, Three Strikes: The Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century (2001); and Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (1990). He is the co-editor, with Jesse Benjamin, of Walter Rodney’s Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World (2018).

Ching Kwan Lee

Ching Kwan Lee is Professor of Sociology at UCLA. Her books include The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor and Foreign Investment in Africa (2017) and Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt (2007). Recently, she co-edited Take Back our Future: an Eventful Sociology of the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement (2019).

Robert Meister

Robert Meister is Professor of Politics and History of Consciousness, and the Director of the Bruce Initiative on Rethinking Capitalism at UC Santa Cruz. His works include “Liquidity” (2016); “Debt and Taxes: Can the Financial Industry Save Public Universities?” (2011); After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights (2011); and  Political Identity: Thinking Through Marx (1991).

Christopher Nealon

Christopher Nealon is John Dewey Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. He is Senior Editor at English Literary History. He is the author of, among other works, The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century (2011) and the co-editor of After Marx: Literature, Theory and Value in the 21st Century (2022). His most recent book of poetry is The Shore (2022).

Eric Sheppard

Eric Sheppard is the Alexander von Humboldt Chair in Geography at UCLA. His books include Spatial Histories of Radical Geography (2019); Limits to Globalization: Geographical Disruptions of Capitalist Development (2016); Contesting Neoliberalism: Urban Frontiers (with Trevor Barnes, Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell) (2007); and The Capitalist Space Economy: Geographical Analysis after Marx, Ricardo and Sraffa (with Trevor Barnes) (1990).

Beverly Silver

Beverly Silver is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Arrighi Center for Global Studies at Johns Hopkins University. She is author of Forces of Labor: Workers’ Movements and Globalization Since 1870 (2003) and, with Giovanni Arrighi, Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System (1999). Her recent essays include “‘Plunges into Utter Destruction’ and the Limits of Historical Capitalism (2019).

Nikhil Pal Singh

Nikhil Pal Singh is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at NYU, and Founding Faculty Director of the NYU Prison Education Program. He is the author of Race and America’s Long War (2017), and Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (2004). He is also author and editor with Jack O’Dell of Climin’ Jacob’s Ladder: The Black Freedom Movement Writing of Jack O’Dell (2010).

Rodolfo Torres

Rodolfo Torres is Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy and Chicano/Latino Studies at UC Irvine. He is the author of, among many books, Racism and Capitalist Modernity (forthcoming), After Race: Racism after Multiculturalism (2004), and Latino Metropolis (2000).

Kathi Weeks

Kathi Weeks is Professor of Gender, Sexuality and feminist Stydies at Duke University. She is the author of, among other works, “Basic Income from a Feminist Postwork Perspective,” (2022); “Reencountering Marxist Feminism” (2014); and The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries (2011). She is the co-editor, with Michael Hardt, of The Jameson Reader (2000).