Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson

I'm a political theorist who thinks about the life of ideas in Western political culture.

Over the past two decades, I've been thinking mostly about the idea of terrorism, why we talk about it the way we do, and how it shapes ou.

My first book, Genealogies of Terrorism: Revolution, State Terror, Empire (Columbia University Press, 2018), problematized ostensibly obvious assumptions about terrorism in the immediate post-9/11 moment. I was interested in what charges of terrorism did politically, rather than what terrorism really was and how we should best define it. Based on archival research about post-9/11 U.S. counterterrorism, French counterterrorism during the Algerian Revolution, the Russian revolutionary movement, and the upheavals of the French Revolution, a pattern emerged which indicated that terrorism has functioned since the late eighteenth century as a mechanism of social defense that justified the use of the sovereign right to kill in the name of human life. 

My current project argues that the American age of terrorism did not begin in 2001. It shows that terrorism has a long and sordid history that is intrinsically bound to struggles over the American way of life. In these struggles, terrorism is both a response to perceived threats to a way of life, and the name we give to those threats.

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.

I'm the Review Editor for Political Theory, a co-editor for Foucault Studies, and serve as a member of the Editorial Boards for Contemporary Political Theory, GENEALOGY+CRITIQUE (formerly Le foucaldien), and the Bloomsbury book series Critical Theory and the Critique of Society. 

With Colin Koopman, I run the Critical Genealogies Workshop, a support group, so to speak, for practicing genealogists. With Amy Allen, Eduardo Mendieta, Kevin Olson, and Max Pensky, I serve on the steering committee for the Critical Theory Roundtable.