Professor

Co-Editor: Polity, a journal of political science

Office: 1705 HW

Phone: 212-772-5666
Email:rmarasco@hunter.cuny.edu

Areas of Specialization:

• History of Political Thought 
• Critical Theory
• Feminist Theory
• Psychoanalysis

Recent Courses:

• PolSc 200: Introduction to Political Ideas
• PolSc 204: Political Theory & Film (summer session)
• PolSc 204.78: Frantz Fanon: Anti-Colonialism, Militancy, and Revolution
• PolSc 302: Critical Theory & Politics
• PolSc 304.01: On Authority
• PolSc 304.02: Machiavelli and Methods
• PolSc 307: Theories of Revolution
• PolSc 309: Feminist Political Theory
• PolSc 311: Utopian Theory

Education:
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley (2006)

M.A., University of California, Berkeley (2000)

B.A. Smith College (1999)

Publications:

• BOOKS:
• The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory After Hegel (Columbia University Press, 2015).
• EDITED COLLECTIONS:
• The Political Encounter with Louis Althusser, co-edited with Banu Bargu, a special issue of Rethinking Marxism, vol. 31, no. 3, July 2019.
• The Authoritarian Personality, a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 117, no. 4, 2018.
• ARTICLES AND REVIEW ESSAYS:
• "Bringing the War Home: Frantz Fanon and the Disorders of Violence," forthcoming in Representations.
• "The Real Possibility of Physical Killing: A Feminist Critique of Carl Schmitt," American Journal of Political Science, vol. 67, no. 4, October 2023 (co-winner of the Okin-Young Prize for best article in feminist political theory)
• "Machiavelli and the Play-Element in Political Life,” Political Theory, vol. 50, no. 4, 2022.
• “Critique and Politics: A Feminist Reading of Wendy Brown” in Power, Neoliberalism, and the Reinvention of Politics: The Critical Theory of Wendy Brown (Penn State Press, 2022).
• “On the Uses and Abuses of Weber for Comparative Political Science,” PS: Political Science & Politics, vol. 55, no. 1, 2022.
• “Bataille’s Anti-Fascism,” Contemporary Political Theory, vol. 21, no. 1, 2022.
• "Thinking at the Extremes," Critical Times, vol. 4, no 1, 2021 (for a special symposium on Rethinking Violence with Étienne Balibar).
• "Heliotropes," Philosophy and Social Criticism, vol. 46, no. 1, 2020 (for a special symposium on Critical Theory, Exile, and Jewish Identity: On Seyla Benhabib's Exile, Statelessness, and Migration).
• "On Womanly Nihilism: Beauvoir and Us," boundary2, vol. 47, no. 1, 2020.
• "Althusser's Gramscian Debt: On Reading Out Loud," Rethinking Marxism, vol. 31, no. 3, 2019.
• "There's a Fascist in the Family: Critical Theory and Anti-Authoritarianism," South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 117, no. 4, 2018.
• "It's All About the Benjamins: Considerations on the Gambler as a Political Type," New German Critique, vol. 133, no. 1, 2018.
• "Critical Theory and the Task of Political Education," Theory & Event, vol. 20, no. 3, 2017.
• "The Epic as Form," Contemporary Political Theory, vol. 16, no. 1, 2017 (a special symposium on Sheldon Wolin's Theoretical Practice).
• "Toward a Critique of Conspiratorial Reason," Constellations, vol. 23, no. 2, 2016 (special issue on "Critical Theory and Psychoanalysis").
• "Terms and Conditions: The Sexual Contract Twenty-Five Years Later," History of the Present, vol. 3, no. 2, 2013.
• “Defining Romnesia,” Theory & Event, vol. 13, no. 1, 2013.
• "Machiavelli contra Governmentality," Contemporary Political Theory, vol. 11, no. 4, 2012.
• "'I would rather wait for you than believe you are not coming at all': Revolutionary Love in a Post-Revolutionary Time," Philosophy and Social Criticism, vol. 36, no. 6, 2010.
• "A Grammar of Hope in An Age of Empire?" Review of Paolo Virno's Grammar of the Multitude, Theory & Event, vol. 9, no. 4, 2010.
• "'Already the Effect of the Whip': Critical Theory and the Feminine Ideal," differences, vol. 17, no. 1, 2006.