Sarah Johnson is a senior lecturer in the Law, Letters, and Society program at the University of Chicago. She offers courses on law and political economy and oversees the program’s thesis requirement. She also regularly teaches in the Classics of Social and Political Thought sequence in the Social Sciences Core.
Her research interests lie in the history of social and political thought, particularly since the eighteenth century. She is currently working on two projects that explore the relationship between social and political thought and the historical imagination. One is a book manuscript (The Ages We Live By) that examines how practices of historical periodization shape efforts to analyze and reimagine social and political life. The other is a project on the coevolution of Karl Marx’s ideas about history, critique, and political economy. Her work on Marx has appeared in Modern Intellectual History and the Journal of the History of Ideas.
Prior to joining the Law, Letters, and Society program, she was a Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago and a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College. She studied political theory at Bryn Mawr College and the University of Chicago, where she earned her PhD in 2015.