Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson

Associate Professor of Philosophy
Syracuse University

Twitter

I am a critical theorist whose work is situated at the intersection of political theory, philosophy, history, and conflict/terrorism studies.

My primary research focus is the development of an empirically grounded and philosophically rigorous account of terrorism useful for contemporary analysis. I'm at work on a book, Traitors to Forgetting: A Genealogy of White Supremacist Terrorism in the United States, which combines the tools of Critical Race scholarship and philosophical genealogy to tell a new story of American terrorism. Drawing on neglected knowledges of white supremacist terrorism, the book explores struggles about the meaning of this term and efforts to combat both white supremacist terrorism and political elites' power to define it. The result is a new account of America’s history of white supremacist terrorism that is more than a record of horrific violence: it is a story of spirited resistance and creative meaning-making as Black abolitionists, anarchists, anti-lynching activists, socialists, feminists, trade unionists, and Black liberation movements produced counter-histories and -practices to contest, combat, and transform white supremacist terrorism.

In my first book, Genealogies of Terrorism: Revolution, State Terror, Empire (Columbia University Press, 2018), I draw on a wide range of archives from the French Revolution to late-imperial Russia, colonized Algeria, and post-9/11 United States, to show that terrorism is a historically constituted composite concept that is overlaid by a multiplicity of meanings and uses. Its main function is to articulate contextually specific and variable forms of enmity that allow for the establishment of pervasive networks of power aimed at the protection and defense of the social body.

In addition to my work on terrorism, I'm interested in questions of method in political theory, with a special emphasis on archival and interpretive methods. I've also written about various aspects of Michel Foucault's work and about diversity and inclusion in the academy.

With Colin Koopman, I run the Critical Genealogies Workshop, a support group, so to speak, for practicing genealogists. With Alex Livingston, I direct a CNY Humanities Corridor working group on Genealogy in the Humanities. I serve on the steering committee for the Critical Theory Roundtable, as a co-editor for Foucault Studies, and as a member of the Editorial Boards for GENEALOGY+CRITIQUE (formerly Le foucauldien) and the Bloomsbury book series Critical Theory and the Critique of Society. I'm also the Critical Exchange editor for Contemporary Political Theory and co-direct, with Yannik Thiem, the Book Selection Advisory Committee for the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP).

At Syracuse University, I'm co-director of the Political Philosophy BA program, senior research associate at the Campbell Public Affairs Institute, and an affiliated faculty member with the Departments of Political Science and Women's and Gender Studies.