About Us

Josep Maria Antentas is a sociologist currently working at the Facultat d’Educació Social i Treball Social Pere Tarrés, Universitat Ramon Llull in Barcelona. He has researched and published on labour, social movements, internationalism and political strategy.

Svenja Bromberg is a Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research and teaching focus on issues of emancipation, radical democracy, citizenship and human rights between the 18th and 21st century as well as on different conceptions of (historical, dialectical, new) materialism. She completed her PhD “Thinking ‘Emancipation’ after Marx – A Conceptual Analysis of Emancipation between Citizenship and Revolution in Marx and Balibar” in 2016 at Goldsmiths funded by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung and the German Academic Exchange Service. Svenja is a co-editor of Eurotrash (published 2016 at Merve Verlag, Berlin) and a member on the editorial board of the publisher August Verlag Berlin.

Sebastian Budgen works as senior editor for Verso Books. He lives in Paris and works particularly on transformations of French political and intellectual life.

Demet Şahende Dinler is Helena Normanton Research Fellow in International Development at the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex. She holds undergraduate degrees in Political Science and  Sociology from the Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara, Turkey and completed her MSc and PhD degrees in Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Her PhD was a multi-sited analysis of the recycling market including waste pickers, scrap traders in Turkey and the London Metal Exchange. She is currently working on an ethnographic research project entitled “Governing Nature and Market: Farmers, Traders and Experts in the Cut Flower Industry” which traces the varieties of production and exchange relations in the cut flower market from farms/greenhouses to local/global auctions. Apart from her academic research, Demet worked as the UPS workers’ organising campaign coordinator for the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) and has been an experienced trainer and organiser for informal workers’ associations/unions including waste pickers, construction workers and domestic workers in Turkey. Her articles on labour and class struggle have been published in Third World Quarterly and Class Strikes Back (Azzellini and Kraft (eds.), 2018, Brill). She is also a member of the Turkish Collective/Magazine 1+1 Express.

Sai Englert is a lecturer at Leiden University. He works on the Political Economy, Labour Movements, Zionism, anti-Semitism and Settler Colonialism.

Juan Grigera is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow based at University College London Institute of Americas. He completed a PhD from the University of Buenos Aires with support from CONICET (Argentina), after being awarded an MSc in Development Studies from the London School of Economics. His work on the Argentine 2001 crisis, ECLAC, deindustrialization and class formation has been published in several journals and he has recently edited Argentina despues de la convertibilidad (2002-2011). He is an active member of the editorial board of Cuadernos de Economía Crítica (Argentina) in addition to Historical Materialism. His latest research project is entitled Bringing the global market back in. Industrialising and exporting commodities: Argentina and Brazil (1950-2010) and proposes an in-depth comparative study of the long-term economic performance of Brazil and Argentina after 1950s. This research concerns both the comparative assessment of the economic dynamics of two key countries of Latin America and the theoretical modes in which they have been approached.

Katharina Hunfeld is a political theorist currently working as Associate Lecturer at the University of St Andrews. Her main research interests include the politics of time and temporality, Marxist Ecology, and the entanglement of emancipatory struggles.

Alex de Jong is co-director of the International Institute for Research and Education, based in Amsterdam. His research interests include communist movements in South-East Asia, as well as historical and contemporary far-right movements and ideologies. He co-edited October 1917 – Workers in Power (2017, IIRE & Merlin Press) and edited a collection of essays by Enzo Traverso: Critique of Modern Barbarism. Essays on fascism, anti-Semitism and the use of history (2019, IIRE). He is a member of the socialist group Grenzeloos in the Netherlands.

Robert Knox is a Lecturer in Law at the University of Liverpool. His primary interest lies in the fields of Marxist and critical legal theory, especially as regards international law. More specifically, his research attempts to analyse the close interconnection between capitalism, imperialism, processes of racialisation and international law. His work has also attempted to examine the role that law plays in promoting and inhibiting radical social change, focusing particularly on the way in which law is able to reshape collective political subjectivity. He is currently working Against International Law (Verso) co-authored with China Miéville. Some of his publications can be found here.

Ashok Kumar is a Senior Lecturer of Political Economy at Birkbeck University. He writes on issues of urban theory, development, capitalist crisis, workers’ movements, global supply chains and identity. His most recent book Monopsony Capitalism: Power and Production in the Twilight of the Sweatshop Age (Cambridge University Press) was the winner of the American Sociological Association’s 2021 Paul Sweezy Outstanding Book Prize and the 2022 Immanuel Wallerstein Memorial Book Award. The book demonstrates that the production process under global capitalism is governed by a universal logic that shapes the structural bargaining power of workers. Alongside Historical Materialism, Kumar has sat on the editorial boards of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space and the urban geography journal City. He also co-hosts the Historical Materialism Podcast.

Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of  London. She is the author of Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (Pluto, 2000), Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-garde (Verso, 2002), Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (Reaktion 2005), Walter Benjamin: Critical Lives (Reaktion, 2007) and Liquid Crystals: The Art and Science of a Fluid Form (Reaktion, 2016). As well as her association with Historical Materialism, she is in the editorial collective of Radical Philosophy  and an editor of Revolutionary History. Her research interests are in Marxist theories of aesthetics and culture, with a particular focus on the work of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Other research interests include European literary and visual modernism, the ‘everyday’ and value, memory and history, madness and expression and digital aesthetics. Together with Ben Watson she runs the website www.militantesthetix.co.uk.

Andreas Malm is an associate senior lecturer in human ecology at Lund University. He is the author, most recently, of Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (Verso, 2016), The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World (Verso, 2017), and How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight a World on Fire (Verso, 2021). His primary research interest is the role of fossil fuels in the history of capitalist development, but he also writes on other aspects of climate change and currently works on a book about the politics of wilderness.

Roberto Mozzachiodi is a casualised academic, a workplace organiser and a translator. He is an Associate Lecturer at Goldsmiths College and a Visiting Lecturer at Regent’s University. He writes on Francophone Marxist histories and philosophy and labour struggles in the education sector.

Maïa Pal is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Oxford Brookes University. She defended her PhD in International Relations at the University of Sussex in 2013 on ‘The Politics of Extraterritoriality: a historical sociology of public international law’. Her research interests are early modern European and colonial history, law and state formation, global governance and free trade agreements, extraterritorial jurisdiction, and contemporary student movements in relation to counter-conduct and critical pedagogy. She has published in Global Society and in International Studies Perspectives. She is currently working on a monograph entitled Jurisdictional Accumulation: an Early Modern History of Law, Empires, and Capital(forthcoming, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), and on a co-edited volume The Extraterritoriality of Law: History, Theory, Politics (2019, Abingdon: Routledge). She is also a member of the Political Marxism research group at the University of Sussex.

Paul Reynolds is Reader in Sociology and Social Philosophy at Edge Hill University in the UK. His research interests and publications lie in the areas of Marxism and radical philosophy/social theory with special reference to: sexuality and sexual politics, ethics and difference; class and political critique; and the role and responsibilities of intellectuals. He is currently developing critical work on sexual consent, literacy and well-being and the power of cultural materialism. He is co-convenor of the International Network for Sexual Ethics and Politics (INSEP – http://www.insep.ugent.be/) and editor of its Journal and also co-convenors the Historical Materialism Sexuality and Political Economy Network. He is Co-Director of the Cultural Difference and Social Solidarity (CDSS – http://www.differenceandsolidarity.org/).

Panagiotis Sotiris has a PhD from Panteion University Athens. He currently works as a journalist and editor in Athens, Greece. He has taught social and political philosophy at various Greek Universities. His research interests include Marxist philosophy, the theory of imperialism and left strategy. His book A Philosophy for Communism: Rethinking Althusser is forthcoming from Brill in the Historical Materialism Series.

Alexander Stoffel is a Fellow at the London School of Economics (LSE). His main research interests include gender and sexuality studies, theories of International Relations, global historical sociology, and histories of Left struggle. Stoffel completed his PhD, ‘Queer Worldmaking: Radical Sexual Politics in the Age of United States Hegemony’, at Queen Mary University funded by the Leverhulme Trust. He is a former editorial board member at Millennium: Journal of International Studies.

Peter Thomas is Lecturer in the History of Political Thought at Brunel University, London. He is the author of The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism (Brill, 2009; Haymarket, 2011), and (with Juha Koivisto) Mapping Communication and Media Research: Conjunctures, Institutions, Challenges (Tampere University Press, 2010) and co-editor (with Riccardo Bellofiore and Guido Starosta) of In Marx’s Laboratory: Critical Interpretations of the Grundrisse (Brill, 2012). He has published widely on Marxist political theory and philosophy, the history of political thought and the history of philosophy. He is the translator of Antonio Negri, Goodbye Mr Socialism, (Seven Stories Press, 2008), (with Alberto Toscano) Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek’s, Philosophy in the Present (Polity, 2009), Mario Tronti’s Workers and Capital(Mayfly, 2012) and (with Sara R. Farris) Mario Tronti’s The Autonomy of the Political(forthcoming, 2012). He is currently working on three research projects: first, a critical history of contemporary Western European Marxisms, from 1945 to the present; second, a study of recent debates about the notion of the Political; and third, a critical reconstruction of the history of the concept of conjuncture in modern political thought and the social sciences.

Alberto Toscano is Professor of Critical Theory in the Department of Sociology and Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Term Research Associate Professor at the School of Communications at Simon Fraser University. He is the author of Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (Verso, 2010; 2017, 2nd ed.), Cartographies of the Absolute (with Jeff Kinkle, Zero Books, 2015), Una visión compleja. Hacía una estética de la economía (Meier Ramirez, 2021), La abstracción real. Filosofia, estética y capital (Palinodia, 2021), and the co-editor of the 3-volume The SAGE Handbook of Marxism (with Sara Farris, Bev Skeggs and Svenja Bromberg, SAGE, 2022), and Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Abolition Geography: Essays in Liberation (with Brenna Bhandar, Verso, 2022). His Terms of Order: Keywords for an Interregnum (Seagull) and Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis (Verso) will be published in 2023. He is a member of the editorial board of the journal Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory and is series editor of The Italian List for Seagull Books. He is also the translator of numerous books and essays by Antonio Negri, Alain Badiou, Franco Fortini, Furio Jesi and others.

Jamie Woodcock is a senior lecturer at the University of Essex and a researcher based in London. He is the author of books including Troublemaking (Verso, 2023), The Fight Against Platform Capitalism (University of Westminster Press, 2021), The Gig Economy (Polity, 2019), Marx at the Arcade (Haymarket, 2019), and Working the Phones (Pluto, 2017). His research is inspired by workers’ inquiry and focuses on labour, work, the gig economy, platforms, resistance, organising, and videogames. He is also on the editorial board of Notes from Below.