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 2022-2025: 

Kristin Plys. (First view). “The Cold War from the Global South: Maoism and the future of liberalism” invited contribution to special issue, ‘What Was the Cold War?’ edited by Mitchell Stevens and Ioana Sendriou Social Science History 49(2) [link]

Kristin Plys. (2025). “Antifascist Algiers from La Résistance to the Black Panthers: A comparative history of theory making in Algiers’ café culture, 1942 & 1969” symposium on ‘Anti-Fascism and the Café Culture’ Social History of Alcohol and Drugs 39(1): 30-64. [link]

Himani Bannerji, Kanishka Goonewardena, Kristin Plys and Priyansh (2024). “Interview with Himani Bannerji” Political Power and Social Theory 40: 181-188. [link]

Kristin Plys. (2024). “Anti-colonial Marxism in French and Portuguese India: Varadarajulu Subbiah and Aquino de Bragança’s Theories of Colonial Independence” Political Power and Social Theory 40: 153-179. [link]

Kristin Plys, Priyansh, and Kanishka Goonewardena. (2024). “Marxist Theory Unbound: Global Perspectives from South Asia” Political Power and Social Theory 40: 1-17. [link]

Kristin Plys. (2023). “The Female Nude in Anti-Zia Feminist Painting” 21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual/Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte und visuellen Kultur 4: 639-673. [link]

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. [link]

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. [link]

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. [link]

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. [link]

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.