Matthew Shafer

Website

shafer.info

Biography

My work brings together transnational intellectual history and contemporary social theory to examine how fundamental political ideas are formed and contested over time.

I’m now writing a book on recent debates about how the word violence should be defined in political theory and deployed in political rhetoric. How do we draw the line between violence and nonviolence? Where do terms like “structural violence” come from? Why does so much contemporary activist and academic debate about violence focus on language as a space of power and harm? These are the sorts of questions that my project examines.

Beyond this work on violence, I have broader research interests in the methodological dilemmas of qualitative social inquiry today.

Degrees

PhD, Political Science, Yale University (2020)

MA, History, Yale University (2017)

MPhil, Political Science, Yale University (2017)

MPhil, Political Thought and Intellectual History, with distinction, Clare College, Univeristy of Cambridge (2014) 

BA, Philosophy, cum laude and with distinction in the major, Yale University (2013)