Timothy Shenk
Timothy Shenk is a historian of the modern United States with a particular interest in political and intellectual history. His latest book, Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics, will be published by Columbia Global Reports this fall. The book uses the history of a long-running battle inside the Democratic consultant class to explore the remaking of leftwing electoral coalitions around the world over the last fifty years. His previous book, Realigners: Partisan Hacks, Political Visionaries, and the Struggle to Rule American Democracy, chronicled the making and breaking of the country’s dominant political majorities from the founding to the present; published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, it was named one of the best political books of 2022 by the Wall Street Journal. He is currently working on an intellectual biography of the American economy, which is under contract with Princeton University Press.
Before coming to GW, Professor Shenk was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis and a National Fellow at New America. His work has also been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Jacob K. Javits fellowship program. A senior editor at Dissent, his writings have appeared in a number of outlets, including the New York Times, the Nation, the New Republic, the Guardian, and the London Review of Books. In 2024, he was named GW’s best professor by the university’s student newspaper, the Hatchet.
Books
Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics
Realigners: Partisan Hacks, Political Visionaries, and the Struggle to Rule American Democracy (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2022).
Maurice Dobb: Political Economist (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
Articles and Book Chapters
“Seeing Like a Strategist,” in Lily Geismer and Brent Cebul, eds.,Mastery and Drift: Professional-Class Liberals since the 1960s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).
“Taking Off the Neoliberal Lens: The Politics of the Economy, the MIT School of Economics, and the Strange Career of Lawrence Klein,” Modern Intellectual History (2022).
“Inventing the American Economy,” in Romain Huret, Nelson Lichtenstein, and Jean-Christian Vinel, eds., Capitalism Contested: The New Deal and Its Legacies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).
“‘I Am No Longer Responsible for Its Actions’: E.P. Thompson After Moral Economy,” Humanity (2020).
“Les savoirs de l’économie / Economic knowledge,” with Timothy Mitchell, in Christophe Bonneuil and Dominique Pestre, eds., Histoire des sciences et des savoirs / History of Science and Knowledge (Seuil, 2015).
Essays and Reviews
“A Lost Manuscript Shows the Fire Barack Obama Couldn’t Reveal on the Campaign Trail,” New York Times, October 2, 2022.
“The Struggle for the Soul of the GOP,” The New Republic, April 12, 2022.
“Elizabeth Warren Was the Wrong Kind of Radical,” New York Times, March 5, 2020.
“Two Paths for Millennial Politics,” Dissent, Summer 2019.
“The Political Odyssey of Sean Wilentz,” The Nation, June 3, 2019.
“Already Great,” Dissent, Spring 2019.
“Right Privilege,” Dissent, Winter 2019.
“Crisisology,” The New Republic, September 2018.
“Left to Their Own Devices,” Times Literary Supplement, February 9, 2019.
“Wonk Republic,” The New Republic, December 2017.
“Find the Method,” The London Review of Books, June 29, 2017.
“Dead Center,” The New Republic, January/February, 2017.
“The Secret History of Trumpism,” The Guardian, August 16, 2016.
“The Only Game in Town?,” The Nation, March 7, 2016.
“Apostles of Growth,” The Nation, November 24, 2014.
“What Was Socialism?,” The Nation, May 5, 2014.
“The Long Shadow of Mont Pèlerin,” Dissent, Autumn 2013.
“A Marxist in Keynes’ Court,” Jacobin, Autumn 2013.
“Love in the Time of Capital,” Dissent, Summer 2012.
Ph.D., Columbia University, 2016