Associated Visiting Scholars

Mark Bray

Mark Bray is a historian of human rights, terrorism, and political radicalism in Modern Europe. He completed his PhD in Modern European and Women's and Gender History at Rutgers University in 2016, and is currently finishing his manuscript "The Anarchist Inquisition: Terrorism and the Ethics of Modernity in Spain, 1893-1909." "The Anarchist Inquisition" explores the emergence of groundbreaking human rights campaigns across Europe and the Americans in response to the Spanish state's brutal repression of dissent in the wake of anarchist bombings and assassinations. At GRID, he will begin work on his next project which explores the cultures of violence and street resistance that emerge in the social movements of postwar Western Europe and their impact on conceptions of leftist masculinity in the context of the emergence of competing conceptions of feminism. Bray is the author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook (Melville House, 2017) and Translating Anarchy: The Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street (Zero Books, 2013) as well as the co-editor of the forthcoming Francisco Ferrer and the Modern School (PM Press, 2018).

For inquiries: alexandra@mhpbooks.com

Garnet Kindervater

I am a political scientist whose work, broadly conceived, inhabits the critical theoretic tradition. My work tends to question the concepts of life and survival in contemporary political contexts with reference to the history of philosophy, critical, political, and cultural theory, as well as current debates in the social sciences. My dissertation, "Politics of the Highly Improbable: Anticipation, Catastrophe, Security" explores the emergence since the Cold War of a political rationality that I develop under the banner of "catastrophism": the rational orientation to fear of future disaster, the sensible preoccupation for protecting against human finitude. As a response, I advance a conceptual framework for understanding the political force of imagining future large-scale disasters. I characterize future catastrophes not as empirical realities in themselves, but as categories of thought, as conceptualizations of threat, as abstractions bearing enormous political force. I also have research programs and papers on ontology and the New Materialisms; the state and capital in crisis; as well as the intertwined subjects of contingency and finitude in 20th century French and Italian political thought.