About the Speaker

Timothy Mitchell is a political theorist and historian. His areas of research include the place of colonialism in the making of modernity, the material and technical politics of the Middle East, and the role of economics and other forms of expert knowledge in the government of collective life. Much of his current work is concerned with ways of thinking about politics that allow material and technical things more weight than they are given in conventional political theory.  Educated at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he received a first-class honours degree in History, Mitchell completed his PhD in Politics and Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University in 1984. He joined Columbia University in 2008 after teaching for 25 years at New York University, where he served as Director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies. At Columbia he teaches courses on the history and politics of the Middle East, colonialism, and the politics of technical things.