Notes on Contributors
Robert J. Antonio
is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Kansas. He specializes in social theory, but also teaches and works in the areas of globalization, political economy, and environment. He is currently working on multiple projects related to contemporary capitalism’s crisis tendencies, especially concerning the intersection of increased economic inequality, ecological risk, and democratic and authoritarian responses. Among his earlier publications related to themes in his essay in this collection are “Immanent Critique as the Core of Critical Theory” (British Journal of Sociology 32(3): 330–345) and “After Postmodernism: Reactionary Tribalism” (American Journal of Sociology 106(1): 40–87).
Stefanie Baumann
is currently a contracted researcher at CineLab/ifilnova (New University of Lisbon, Portugal). She obtained her Ph.D. in philosophy in 2013, and has taught philosophy, aesthetics, and contemporary art theory at University of Paris viii (Paris, 2007–10), Ashkal Alwan (Beirut, 2013), alba – the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts/University of Balamand (Beirut, 2012–15), and the Maumaus Study Program (Lisbon, since 2016). She also worked with the artist Esther Shalev-Gerz as personal assistant from 2005 to 2010 and collaborated with video artists Marie Voignier and Mounira Al Solh.
Christopher Craig Brittain
is Dean of Divinity and Margaret E. Fleck Chair in Anglican Studies at Trinity College in the University of Toronto. He is interested in political theology and the writings of the early Frankfurt School on religion and theology. His publications include: “Racketeering in Religion: Adorno and evangelical support for Donald Trump,” Critical Research on Religion 6(3) (2018), The Anglican Communion at a Crossroads: The Crisis of a Global Church, Religion at Ground Zero: Theological responses to times of crisis (Continuum, 2011), and Adorno and Theology (T&T Lark, 2010).
Dustin J. Byrd
is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Olivet College (Michigan). He earned his Ph.D. in political and social philosophy at Michigan State University (2017), where he specialized in the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory of Religion, as well as modern Islamic thought. He is the author of numerous books, including Critical Theory of Religion: From the Frankfurt School to Emancipatory Islamic Thought (Ekpyrosis Press, 2020), and Islam in a Post-Secular Society: Religion, Secularity, and the Antagonism of Recalcitrant Faith (Brill 2016; Haymarket Books, 2017). He has co-edited numerous books, including those on the subject of Malcolm X, Ali Shariati, and Frantz Fanon. He is the Editor-and-Chief of Islamic Perspective Journal, published by the London Academy of Iranian Studies, as well as the Editor-and-Chief of Ekpyrosis Press, which he founded in 2020. He is currently studying the intersection of Far-Right populism and Islam in Europe, as well as palingenetic ultra-nationalism in the United States.
Mariana Caldas Pinto Ferreira
is a Ph.D. Candidate at Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (puc-Rio). She holds a Master’s degree in law, and worked as an Associate Researcher at the Truth Commission of Rio de Janeiro between 2014 and 2015. She was a Visiting Researcher fellow of the Department of War Studies, King’s College London during 2018 and 2019. Her research aims to discuss violence in the field of critical security studies by engaging with its representation along with aesthetics literature and privileging lived experience of suffering expressed in works of art, specifically with Brazilian art.
Panayota Gounari
is Professor and Chair of the Department of Applied Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She has published extensively on the politics of language & bilingualism, the discourse of financial crises, authoritarian discourse, language policy, and critical pedagogy. Her most recent books include Liberatory and Critical Education in Greece: Historical Trajectories and Perspectives (Gutenberg, 2016, co-authored with G. Grolllios) and the edited volume A Reader in Critical Pedagogy (Gutenberg, 2010).
Peter-Erwin Jansen
is the editor of six volumes of previously unpublished writings from the Marcuse papers and responsible for new publications from the Leo Loewenthal Archive. Both held at the Archivzentrum of the Goethe University in Frankfurt. He currently teaches social science and social work at the University of Applied Sciences, Koblenz, Germany. During his university studies in Frankfurt, he did research on Marcuse’s social philosophy under Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth. Most recent books in English include Ecology and the Critique of Society Today. Five selected papers for the current context, co-edited with Herbert Marcuse, S. Surak and Ch. Reitz (independently published, 2019) and Transvaluation of Values & Radical Change. Five Lectures 1966–1976, edited by Herbert Marcuse (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2017). Both books are sponsoring the International Herbert Marcuse Society (ihms). In German Jansen recently co-edited with L. Doppler/A. Doppler-Neupert Herbert Marcuse: Kapitalismus und Opposition. Vorlesungen zum eindimensionalen Menschen. Paris, Vicennes 1974 (zu Klampen Verlag, 2017) and “Die irrationale Rationalität des Fortschritts. Herbert Marcuses weitsichtige Technologiekritik”, in Zeitschirft für Kritische Theorie, 48/49 (11/2019): 232–251.
Imaculada Kangussu
is professor at the Instituto de Filosofia, Artes e Cultura of the Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto, Brasil. She is the author of Sobre Eros [About Eros] (Skriptum, 2007), Leis da Liberdade [Laws of Freedom] (Ed. Loyola, 2008), and A Fantasia e as Fantasias [The Fantasy and the Fantasies] (2020, forthcoming). Among her edited volumes are Katharsis (C/Arte, 2002), Theoria Aesthetica (Escritos, 2005), O Cômico e o Trágico (7 Letras, 2008), and Estéticas Moderna e Contemporânea (Relicário, 2017). Kangussu is the treasurer of the Brazilian Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures. She serves on the board of the International Herbert Marcuse Society.
Douglas Kellner
is George Kneller Chair in the Philosophy of Education at ucla and is author of many books on social theory, politics, history, and culture. His most recent books are American Nightmare: Donald Trump, Media Spectacle, and Authoritarian Populism (Springer, 2016) and The American Horror Show: Election 2016 and the Ascendency of Donald J. Trump (Springer, 2017). Kellner’s website is at
Dan Krier
is Professor of Sociology at Iowa State University where he specializes in critical social theory, political economy, and comparative-historical sociology. His books include Capital in the Mirror (co-edited with mp Worrell, suny, 2020); The Social Ontology of Capitalism (co-edited with M. P. Worrell, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); nascar, Sturgis and the New Economy of Spectacle (with W. Swart, Brill, 2016), and Capitalism’s Future: Alienation, Emancipation and Critique (co-edited with M. P. Worrell, Brill, 2016). He is currently completing Economic Theology: The Religious Foundations of Capitalism (under contract with Brill, to be published in the Studies in Critical Social Sciences Series).
Lauren Langman
received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago Committee on Human Development He has since been a Professor of Sociology at Loyola University of Chicago. His work is in the tradition of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, with a focus on relationships between culture, identity, ideology and politics/political movements. His latest books are on American Character: God, Guns, Gold and Glory (Brill, 2016) and Inequality in the 21st C: Marx, Piketty and beyond (Brill, 2018), and Mobilization for Dignity (Routledge, forthcoming).
Claudia Leeb
is an Associate Professor in political theory at Washington State University. She works at the intersection of early Frankfurt school Critical Theory, feminist theory, and psychoanalysis to address questions of power and socio-political change. Here recent books are The Politics of Repressed Guilt (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), and Power and Feminist Agency in Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2017). She has published in numerous journals, including Political Theory, Theory & Event, Perspectives on Politics, Constellations, Social Philosophy Today, Philosophy & Social Criticism, and Radical Philosophy Review. She has also contributed several book chapters to anthologies on Frankfurt School Critical Theory.
Gregory Joseph Menillo
is a composer and Ph.D. candidate at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he also holds a certificate in Critical Theory specializing in the work of Theodor W. Adorno. His doctoral dissertation focuses on Adorno’s aesthetic theory and its relationship to post-war American modernist music, specifically the work of Elliott Carter. He is an adjunct lecturer at both Manhattan College and Lehman College, where he teaches courses in the aesthetics of music, music theory and analysis, and music history.
Jeremiah Morelock
is an instructor of sociology at Boston College. In his research, he analyzes populism, authoritarianism, and illness narratives in media and popular culture. He is the editor of Critical Theory and Authoritarian Populism (University of Westminster, 2018), and co-author (with Felipe Ziotti Narita) of O Problema do Populismo (Paco, 2019). He is also author of The Society of the Selfie (University of Westminster, forthcoming), and Pandemics, Authoritarian Populism and Science Fiction: Tribalism, Militarism, Medicine and Morality in American Film (Routledge, forthcoming). Morelock is co-editor (with Felipe Ziotti Narita) of a forthcoming special issue of Theoretical Practice. He serves as a reviewer for the journals TripleC: Capitalism, Communication and Critique, Cadernos cimeac, and Fast Capitalism, and, is founder and director of the Critical Theory Research Network.
Felipe Ziotti Narita
received a postdoctoral training in the social sciences at the University of São Paulo (usp) and Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar), as well as a Ph.D. from the São Paulo State University (unesp). He is a lecturer in public policy at unesp and associate researcher in the social sciences at the São Paulo Research Foundation (fapesp). Ziotti Narita was an invited researcher at the inauguration of the Forschungskreis Gregor Girard at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland), associate editor of Theoretical Practice (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland), and a member of Historiar: Identity Narratives, Concepts, Language (a research group supported by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development of Brazil, CNPq).
Michael R. Ott
is an Emeritus Associate Professor of Sociology at Grand Valley State University, Allendale, Michigan, from which he retired in 2014. He received his Master of Divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1975 and his Ph.D. in sociology from Western Michigan University in 1998, where his focus was on the development of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society (ctrs) under the direction of Dr. Rudolf J. Siebert. Ott is also an ordained minister of the United Church of Christ, having served the church as a full-time pastor for 25 years prior to his becoming a university professor. Although now retired from his institutional professions, he continues his research, writing and public discourses on the dialectical relationship between the Sacred and the Profane, Religion and Reason, Faith and Science as critique of the increasing antagonisms of modernity in the theoretical and practical pursuit of creating a more reconciled, just, humane, and peace-filled future society wherein subjective freedom and universal solidarity prevail.
Charles Reitz
is the author of Ecology and Revolution: Herbert Marcuse and the Challenge of a New World System Today (Routledge, 2018); Philosophy and Radical Pedagogy: Insurrection and Commonwealth (Peter Lang Publishing, 2016); Crisis & Commonwealth: Marcuse, Marx, McLaren (Lexington Books, 2015), and Art, Alienation and the Humanities (State University Of New York Press, 2000).
Avery Schatz
will be graduating in the Fall of 2020 with her bachelor’s degree in sociology from Loyola University. She has worked alongside Lauren Langman as a Research Assistant. At Charles University in Prague, she studied women’s oppression under capitalism. Her research interests include social psychology, gender inequality and Marxist Feminism.
Rudolf J. Siebert
Rudolf J. Siebert was born in Frankfurt am Main, on October 1, 1927. He has studied history, philosophy, psychology, sociology, social work, and theology at the Universities of Frankfurt, Mainz, Münster, and Catholic University of America, Washington DC. Siebert created and is a specialist in the Critical Theory of Religion and Society (ctrs), or Dialectical Religiology (dr). He has taught, lectured, and published widely in Western and Eastern Europe, the United States, Canada, Israel and Japan. He is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Religion, and founder and director of the Center for Humanistic Future Studies, at Western Michigan University. He is also the founder and director of the international courses in Croatia and Crimea. The most recent of his over 30 books is The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society: Union, Disunion, and Reunion of the Sacred and the Profane (1946–2020) (sanbun Publishers, 2020).
William M. Sipling
works in the non-profit industry in the field of digital media and education and is an independent scholar. Previously, he held fellowships at the University of St. Thomas within the Department of Catholic Studies and the School of Law. He has earned master’s degrees in religion from St. Thomas and Dallas Theological Seminary, and his research interests are in social and political theory, mythological and theological studies, and communication and linguistic theory.
David Norman Smith
(Ph.D., Wisconsin) teaches sociology at the University of Kansas. He is the author of books on Marx’s Capital, George Orwell, and class analysis, and his papers have appeared in Sociological Theory, Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Sociological Quarterly, American Psychologist, Rethinking Marxism, Critical Sociology, and other journals and books. His recent articles include several (“The Anger Games”, in Critical Sociology 44(2):195–212; “The Heart of Whiteness: Patterns of Race, Class, and Prejudice in the Divided Midwest” with Eric Hanley, in Political Landscapes of Donald Trump, edited by Barney Warf, Routledge, 2020; and “Authoritarianism Reimagined”, in The Sociological Quarterly 60(2): 210–223) which report findings drawn from authoritarianism scales that the American National Election Study included at his recommendation. With past support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, he is editing Marx’s World: Global Society and Capital Accumulation in Marx’s Late Manuscripts for Yale University Press (forthcoming).
Daniel Sullivan
is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Arizona. He received a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Kansas and a ba in German studies from the University of Arizona. His research concerns cultural differences in how individuals and groups experience and defend against psychological threats, including the psychology of enemyship, scapegoating, and conspiracy theories. He is the author of Cultural-Existential Psychology (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
AK Thompson
got kicked out of high school for publishing an underground newspaper called The Agitator and has been an activist and social theorist ever since. He is currently a Professor of Social Movements and Social Change at Ithaca College, his publications include Sociology for Changing the World: Social Movements/Social Research (Fernwood Publishing, 2006); Black Bloc, White Riot: Anti-Globalization and the Genealogy of Dissent (ak Press, 2010); Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle (ak Press, 2016); Spontaneous Combustion: The Eros Effect and Global Revolution (suny Press, 2017), and, most recently, Premonitions: Selected Essays on the Culture of Revolt (ak Press, 2018). Between 2005 and 2012, he served on the Editorial Committee of Upping the Anti: A Journal of Theory and Action.