Quinn Slobodian
Quinn Slobodian is a Canadian historian specialising in modern Germany and international history. He is currently Professor of International History at Boston University. Previously, he was the Marion Butler McLean Professor of the History of Ideas at Wellesley College and a Residential Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University. Slobodian is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow.
Biography
Slobodian was born in 1978 in Edmonton, Alberta. His father was a doctor. The family moved to Vancouver Island in 1981, and relocated to Lesotho in Southern Africa a few years later. They left for Vanuatu in the South Pacific, in 1992, and returned to Canada a year later.He studied history at Lewis & Clark College, graduating in 2000, and was awarded his PhD by New York University in 2008.
Between 2013 and 2014, he was a Fellow at the Dahlem Humanities Centre of Free University Berlin.
In 2015, he became the Marion Butler McLean Professor of the History of Ideas at Wellesley College. He interrupted his teaching career in 2017 for a year as a residential fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University.
Since 2024, Slobodian has been Professor of International History at Boston University. In the same year, he was a visiting professor at University of Roma 3. Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University.
Until January 2025, Slobodian was a co-editor of Contemporary European History.
He has written the books Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, and Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy.
Publications
As author:Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany, Duke UP, 2012.Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, Harvard UP, 2018.Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy, Metropolitan, 2023.Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, Zone Books, April 2025.As editor:Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World, Berghahn Books, 2015.Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, with Dieter Plehwe and Philip Mirowski, Verso, 2020.Market Civilizations: Neoliberals East and South, with Dieter Plehwe, Zone Books, 2020.