Joshua Foa Dienstag

Joshua Foa Dienstag (PhD, Princeton University, 1993) is Professor of Political Science. He has previously taught at the University of Virginia, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and UCLA where he was Shapiro Family Professor of Modern Political Theory. Dienstag’s study of political theory centers on questions of time, history and narrative. He has written on Continental and American political thought as well as film, AI and the methods of political theory. He has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (twice), the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the Berggruen Institute.

Dienstag is the author of four books: Dancing in Chains: Narrative and Memory in Political Theory (Stanford U.P. 1997); Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit (Princeton U.P. 2006); Cinema, Democracy, Perfectionism: Joshua Foa Dienstag in Dialogue (Manchester U.P. 2016); and Cinema Pessimism: A Political Theory of Representation and Reciprocity (Oxford U.P. 2020). Pessimism won the Book Award for Excellence in Philosophy from the American Association of Publishers.

His articles have appeared in American Political Science Review, Political Theory, The Journal of Politics, Contemporary Political Theory, The Review of Politics, Polity, New Literary History, History & Memory, Philosophy & Social Criticism among other journals. His essay on Blade Runner won the APSA's Wilson Carey McWilliams Award for Best Paper in the Politics, Literature and Film in 2014. He was co-editor of Political Theory from 2020-2023.

His current projects include a book on humans, animals and machines; a further collection of essays on pessimism and a book on the methods of political theory.