Kristin Plys

Kristin Plys is Associate Professor of Sociology and History at the University of Toronto and for 2023-24 the J. Clawson Mills Scholar in the Director's Office at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She received her PhD from Yale University and BA (with honors) from the Johns Hopkins University. Before beginning her PhD, she was a research specialist in the Department of Economics and School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. She has held visiting positions at the Georg-August-Universität-Göttingen in Germany, the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, the Centre for Development Studies in Thiruvanathapuram, India, and the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Pakistan. Her expertise is in political economy, dictatorship in the 1970s Global South, poetry, visual art, and politics in the 1970s Global South, labor history, histories of café culture, and historical method. She is author of Brewing Resistance (2020), winner of the Global Sociology Book Award from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, and co-author with Charles Lemert of Capitalism and its Uncertain Future (2022), honorable mention for the PEWS Immanuel Wallerstein Memorial Book Award.

Recent Publications

Books:

Kristin Plys and Charles Lemert (2022). Capitalism and its Uncertain Future New York: Routledge.

Kristin Plys (2020). Brewing Resistance: Indian Coffee House and the Emergency in Postcolonial India Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
 

Articles Published 2023 - 2020:

Kristin Plys. (2023). “Theories of Antifascism in the Interwar Mediterranean: Autonomous Workers Movements and the Café Culture in Italy & Tunisia, 1922-1945, Part II” Journal of World-Systems Research 29(1): 125-148. https://doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.2023.1138

Kristin Plys. (2022). “Political Work on a Cultural Front: The Postcolonial Avant-garde of Lahore’s Pak Tea House during the Zia Military Dictatorship (1977-1988),” Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory 30(3): 206-235. https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206x-20221954

Kristin Plys. (2022). “Theories of Antifascism in the Interwar Mediterranean: Fascism in the Longue Durée, Part I” invited contribution to special issue ‘Anti-State and Anti-Systemic: Exilic Spaces and Societies in Movement in the World-System’ edited by Spencer Louis Potiker and Yousuf Al-Bulushi Journal of World-Systems Research 28(2): 344-358. https://doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.2022.1105

Kristin Plys. (2022). “Nostalgia for Futures Past: The 1970s Global Left in Naeem Mohaiemen’s Afsan’s Long Day (The Young Man Was, Part II)” Third Text: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture 36(1): 41-55. https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2022.2027672

Kristin Plys (2022). “Postcolonial Autonomous Zones: Urban Spaces of Opposition to Authoritarian Rule in Lahore and Delhi during the Ziaul Haq and Indira Gandhi Regimes” in Amen Jaffer and Mashal Saif Eds. State and Subject Formation in South Asia Karachi: Oxford University Press, pp. 275-298.

Kristin Plys. (2021). “Theorizing Capitalist Imperialism for Anti-Imperialist Praxis: Towards a Rodneyan World Systems Analysis,” Journal of World-Systems Research 27(1): 288-313. https://doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.2021.1022

Kristin Plys. (2020). “The Poetry of Resistance: Poetry as solidarity in postcolonial anti-authoritarian movements in Islamicate South Asia” Theory, Culture & Society 36(7-8): 295-313. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276419882735

Kristin Plys. (2020). “Time and World-History” Critical Sociology 46(4-5): 677-691. https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920519853035