Professor at The European Graduate School / EGS.

Jodi Dean (b. 1962) is a political theorist and Professor of Politics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY. She has been Erasmus Professor in Philosophy at Erasmus University in Rotterdam and on the faculty of the London Critical Theory Summer School at Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.

Dean received a BA in History and Russian Studies from Princeton University. She earned her MA, MPhil, and PhD in Political Science at Columbia University where she focused on political theory. She has held fellowships at Birkbeck, Cardiff, Cornell, McGill, and the Institute for the Human Sciences in Vienna.

Dean is the author of ten books. Her first book, Solidarity of Strangers: Feminism After Identity Politics (University of California Press, 1995) grew out of her dissertation. Working at the intersection of feminist theory and Habermasian discourse ethics, it developed an account of reflective solidarity. Her next two books were published by Cornell University Press: Aliens in America (1998) and Publicity’s Secret (2002). Both books drew on popular conspiracy cultures, psychoanalysis, critical theory, and media theory to investigate changing relations to truth and reality and the impact of these changes on democracy. Žižek’s Politics (Routledge 2006) presented the first book-length analysis of Slavoj Žižek’s contribution to political theory. Dean’s next two books, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies (Duke University Press, 2009) and Blog Theory (Polity Press, 2010) developed the theory of communicative capitalism already emerging in Publicity’s Secret. Dean’s next three books were part of the communist turn in critical theory: The Communist Horizon (Verso 2012), Crowds and Party (Verso 2016), Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging (Verso 2019). Translated into multiple languages, these books criticize contemporary preoccupations with anarchism and democracy to present communism as the horizon of radical politics, the party as a necessary form of political struggle, and comradeship as the relation between those on the same of the struggle. In spring 2025, Verso will publish Dean’s tenth book, Capital’s Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Stuggle. Whereas Rosa Luxemburg identified the political crossroads as the choice between socialism or barbarism, Dean argues that today we face the alternative communism or neofeudalism.

Dean is an active editor. She serves on the editorial boards of multiple journals. From 2008 to 2013 she was the co-editor of Theory & Event. From 2013 to 2020 she was the co-editor of Pluto Press series Digital Barricades. She has edited or co-edited five volumes. Four of these are collections of contemporary essays in the areas of feminist theory, cultural studies, digital media theory, and critical responses to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire. The fifth, most recent, volume brings together the first collection of the writings of Black Communist women writing in the United States. Co-edited with Charisse Burden-Stelly, Organize, Fight, Win was published by Verso in 2022.

Dean’s popular writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Jacobin, Spectre, Boston Review, the Verso Blog, and elsewhere.

She is currently thinking about imperialism.