Sarah Johnson is Director of Undergraduate Studies and Assistant Senior Instructional Professor in the Law, Letters, and Society program at the University of Chicago. 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.
Recent Courses
LLSO 29065/PLSC 23065 Early Theories of Capitalism
LLSO 29066/PLSC 29066 Twentieth-Century Theories of Capitalism
LLSO 28036/PLSC 28036 Karl Marx: Early Writings
LLSO 28038/PLSC 28038/FNDL 21815 Karl Marx: Capital, Volume 1
LLSO 29702/PLSC 25068/GNSE 20117 Feminist Theory and Political Economy
LLSO 29400 and 29401 BA Seminar I and II