Neil Brenner
Lucy Flower Professor of Urban Sociology
Department of Sociology and the College
Neil Brenner is a critical urban theorist, sociologist, and geographer whose research explores diverse aspects of cities and urbanization under modern capitalism. His writing and teaching focus on the theoretical, conceptual, and methodological dimensions of urban questions, and on the challenges of reinventing the field of urban studies in relation to the crises, contradictions, and struggles of our time. His current work focuses on the question of how “hinterlands”—the non-city territories, infrastructures, and ecologies that support urban life—are being remade under contemporary supply-chain capitalism.
Brenner’s books include New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question (Oxford, 2019), Critique of Urbanization: Selected Essays (Bauwelt Fundamente, 2016), and New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood (Oxford, 2004), as well as the edited volume Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization (Jovis, 2014).
Brenner previously served as professor of urban theory at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and as professor of sociology and metropolitan studies at New York University. He holds a PhD in political science from the University of Chicago, an MA in geography from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a BA summa cum laude in philosophy from Yale University.
Photo credit: Maria Ignacia Arrasate