I’m Matt Shafer, a political theorist and assistant professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Florida International University.

Before coming to FIU, I held postdoctoral research positions at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and at the University of Pennsylvania. I received my PhD in 2020 from Yale University.

I have two primary lines of research and writing. The first is a book project (under review) on recent debates about the language of violence in contemporary politics. The second is a longer-term project on problems in Marxist theory, with a particular focus on the status of science and technology in historical materialism.

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The photograph, taken by Leo Wehrli around 1930 and held in the ETH Zürich archives, depicts the main hall of the Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt, Germany. This room—skeletons and all—served as the temporary workspace of the Institute for Social Research before they moved into their own permanent building. I used this image in my article “Engels after Frankfurt: Nature and Enlightenment in Critical Theory,” New German Critique 50:1 (2023), which is probably the essay that best represents the concerns of my current work.