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

I am now completing a book that draws on the work of Engels and Marx to rethink the significance of science, technology, and nature for historical materialism. I have also written on recent debates about the language of violence in contemporary politics, the subject of a second book project. Both areas of research have led to a number of articles in academic journals as well.

Before coming to FIU, I held 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.

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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.