Profile
Robyn Marasco is the Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social Science at The New School for Social Research. She is the author of The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory After Hegel, which reconstructs the emancipatory project of critical theory around the idea of negative dialectics, as well as several articles in leading social science and humanities journals. Her forthcoming book, Elements of a Political Theory of the Family, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2026.
Degrees Held
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley (2006)
M.A., University of California, Berkeley (2000)
B.A., Smith College (1999)
Professional Affiliation
Co-editor, Polity: a journal of the Northeastern Political Science Association
Affiliated Faculty, Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
Recent Publications
Books
The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory After Hegel (Columbia University Press, 2015)
Edited Volumes
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," Representations, vol. 170, no. 1 (2025): 27-53.
“The Real Possibility of Physical Killing: A Feminist Critique of Carl Schmitt,” American Journal of Political Science, vol. 67, no. 4 (2023): 1067-1079. [winner of the Okin-Young Prize]
“Machiavelli and the Play-Element in Political Life,” Political Theory, vol. 50, no. 4 (2022): 575-595.
“Bataille’s Anti-Fascism,” Contemporary Political Theory, vol. 21, no. 1 (2022) 3-23 [lead article].
“Critique and Politics: A Feminist Reading of Wendy Brown” in Power, Neoliberalism, and the Reinvention of Politics: The Critical Theory of Wendy Brown (State College, PA: Penn State Press, 2022).
“On the Uses and Abuses of Weber for Comparative Political Science,” PS: Political Science & Politics, vol. 55, no. 1, 52-55.
"Thinking at the Extremes,” for a symposium on Étienne Balibar, Critical Times, vol. 1, no. 1 (2021): 110-117.
“On Womanly Nihilism: Beauvoir and Us,” boundary 2, vol. 27, no. 1 (2020): 43-64.
“Heliotropes,” for a symposium on Seyla Benhabib’s Exile, Statelessness, and Migration,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, vol. 46, no. 1 (2020): 3-9.
“Althusser’s Gramscian Debt: On Reading Out Loud,” Rethinking Marxism, vol. 31, no. 3 (2019): 340-362.
“There’s a Fascist in the Family: Critical Theory and Anti-Authoritarianism,” South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 117, no. 4 (2018): 791-814.
“It’s All About the Benjamins: Considerations on the Gambler as a Political Type,” New German Critique, vol. 45, no. 1 (2018): 1-22 [lead article].
“Critical Theory and the Task of Political Education,” Theory & Event, vol. 20, no. 3 (2017).
“The Epic as Form,” for an essay collection in memory of Sheldon Wolin, Contemporary Political Theory, vol. 16, no. 1, (2017): 65-76.
“Toward a Critique of Conspiratorial Reason,” Constellations, vol. 23, no. 2 (2016): 236-243.
“Terms and Conditions,” for a symposium on The Sexual Contract Twenty-Five Years Later,” History of the Present, vol. 3, no. 2, (2013): 205-211.
“Defining Romnesia,” Theory & Event, vol. 13, no. 1 (2013).
“Machiavelli Contra Governmentality,” Contemporary Political Theory, vol. 11, no. 4 (2012): 339-361 [lead article].
“‘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): 643-662.
“‘Already the Effect of the Whip’: Critical Theory and the Feminine Ideal,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol. 17, no. 1 (2006): 88-115.
Popular Scholarship
“Reconsidering the Sexual Politics of Fascism,” Historical Materialism Blog, June 25, 2021
Research Interests
history of political thought, critical theory, feminism, psychoanalysis, marxism
Awards And Honors
Okin-Young Prize for Best Article in Feminist Political Theory in 2023.
Member, Institute for Advanced Study, College of Social Science, Princeton, 2021-2022.
Mellon Mid-Career Research Fellowship, Whitney Center at Yale University, 2017-2018.
Henry Wasser Award for Outstanding Scholarship, CUNY Academy for the Humanities and Sciences, 2015.