Fellow 2026-2027 Robert Kirsch
Robert E. Kirsch is an interdisciplinary political theorist who researches extreme organizational change and is an Associate Professor in the School of Applied Professional Studies at Arizona State University. His areas of research include doomsday prepping movements in the United States, the entanglements of energy production, climate change denialism, and heterodox political economies of public finance.
Unifying these areas of research is a focus on sovereignty and exceptionalism that present challenges to democracy during times of crisis. His most recent manuscript is the co-authored Be Prepared: Doomsday Prepping in the United States (Columbia University Press, 2024), and his published work can be found in Theory and Event, Contemporary Political Theory, Apocalyptica, and Thesis Eleven, among others. Kirsch is an associate editor of the journal New Political Science, chair of the International Herbert Marcuse Society, and a Senior Global Futures Scholar at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University.