Katrina Forrester

Katrina Forrester is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Government and Committee on Social Studies at Harvard University. She is a political theorist and historian with interests in the history of liberalism and the left in the postwar US and Britain; theories of work, capitalism, and the state; Marxism, feminism, and psychoanalysis; and climate politics.

Forrester's first book, In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 2019) is a history of how political philosophy was transformed by postwar liberalism, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, and the rise of liberal egalitarianism. In the Shadow of Justice received the Organization of American Historians’ Merle Curti Award and the Society for US Intellectual History’s Book Award, was co-awarded the International Conference for the Study of Political Thought's David and Elaine Spitz Prize, and was shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society’s Gladstone Prize and the European Consortium for Political Research's Political Theory Prize; the manuscript won the Montreal Political Theory Manuscript Workshop Award. Translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Greece, Turkey, South Korea, Japan and China. 

Forrester's current work shifts from the study of theories that legitimate capitalist welfare states to the theories of the movements that resist them. She is now working on a book project, provisionally titled In and Against: The Radical Struggle to Remake the Welfare State in the Neoliberal Age, about forms of political action that people took 'in and against the state' in the long 1970s - over social benefits, housing, work, social service provision, and the local state. It explores how a range of actors, including welfare claimants, feminists, social workers, housing organizers, and political workers developed tactics like demand-making, sabotage, and squatting as part of their struggles with the state, and traces the feminist and anti-capitalist theories of the state that emerged from them. This research formed the basis for her Quentin Skinner Lecture, and her article "Feminist Demands and the Problem of Housework", which was the co-winner of the Okin-Young Award in Feminist Political Theory.  She is also beginning a project about dependency - its injustices, problems, pleasures, and the forms it takes in capitalist societies - which draws from psychoanalysis, feminism, and Marxism. Her research has appeared in the American Political Science Review, Political Theory, Historical Journal, Modern Intellectual History, European Journal of Political Theory, Analyse & Kritik, South Atlantic Quarterly, Review of Politics, Climatic Change, and in a number of edited volumes.  She has written on a variety of topics - including pornography, sex work, policing, surveillance, the gig economy, rentier capitalism, privacy, Bob Dylan, and Corbynism - for the London Review of Books, The New Yorker, Harper's, The Guardian, The Nation, Dissent, n+1, The New Statesman, Jacobin, Boston Review, and elsewhere. She is the co-editor of Nature, Action and the Future: Political Thought and the Environment (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and of a Fall 2020 special section of Dissent on Technology and the Crisis of Work. 

Forrester received her PhD from the University of Cambridge and then held a research fellowship at St John's College, Cambridge and permanent lectureship at Queen Mary University of London until 2017. She was a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress in 2019-20, and the Quentin Skinner Fellow at Cambridge in 2023. At Harvard, she is a Faculty Affiliate of Studies of Women, Gender and Sexualty, the Safra Center for Ethics, the Inequality in America Initiative, and the Harvard University Center for the Environment. She also runs the Capitalism and its Critics workshop. She has served on more than 20 PhD dissertation committees, and is on the editorial board of the American Journal of Political Science.