My book Cosmic Revolutions: The Critical Theory of Friedrich Engels is under contract with Verso.

Through a fundamental reinterpretation of Engels’s work, the book offers a new account of the significance of science, technology, and nature for historical materialism. Amid the chaos of what we tepidly call “climate change” and the upheaval of what we used to call the “information revolution,” it is striking that Engels’s demand for a scientific socialism is today seen more often as an outré slogan than a prescient imperative. But the wager of this book is that if materialist theory today needs Marx, then it needs Engels as well; or, said differently, that if the project of Marxism is still to mean anything at all, it must remain the project of scientific socialism.

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I am also the author of the article on Engels in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

The book itself is related to several of my journal articles. Most directly, it builds on “Engels after Frankfurt: Nature and Enlightenment in Critical Theory” (New German Critique, 2023) and “Rifle Theory: Engels and the History of Technology” (Political Theory, 2023). I have also written about the role of similar questions in Marx’s work: “Marx on Slavery and Capital in the American Civil War” (Political Theory, 2025) focuses especially on the significance of ecological and technological questions for his analysis of the Southern plantation economy.

Certain themes of the project will be developed further in my ongoing collaboration with Alicia Steinmetz on the political theory of advertising, which we see as a fundamental technology of contemporary capitalism. Our article “Marx and the Problem of Advertising” (Theory & Event, 2026) is the first product of this work to appear in print.