I am a political theorist whose research focuses on ideas of collective action in the history of political thought. My scholarly work has been published in Political Theory, and other writing has appeared in The Stopgap and Amor Mundi. From Fall 2024 to Spring 2026, I held the Klemens von Klemperer Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. I received my Ph.D. in political theory from Brown University in February 2024.
My book project, The General Strike and the Politics of Democratic Transformation, draws on the history of ideas and of social movements to develop an account of how general strikes have shaped democracy, and how democratic politics have shaped the theory and practice of the general strike. In it, I explore how and why political thinkers and movements turned to general-strike politics in the 20th century, giving an account of what is democratic in the general strike by recovering what thinkers like Georges Sorel, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and W.E.B. Du Bois had hoped the general strike could achieve and by assessing what we might hope for in remaking the strike today.
For the 2020-2021 academic year, I was a graduate fellow at Brown University’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. During the 2018-2019 academic year, I was a Collaborative Humanities Fellow at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. I hold a B.A. from Amherst College and was previously a Junior Fellow in the Energy and Climate program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
In addition to my scholarly work, I am a labor organizer in New York City. I was on the founding organizing committee of my graduate employee union and serve as a volunteer with the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee.
Contact
dr.j.l.feldman ~at~ gmail
J.L. Feldman 