Professor Paul Apostolidis

Prof Paul Apostolidis specialises in critical theory and integrating empirical inquiry into methods of political theory. He is currently writing a book titled Night Work and the Politics of Freedom (Oxford University Press, forthcoming) which explores the implications of night-time labour in low-wage jobs (AI data annotation, Amazon warehouse work, night-time childcare, and night work driven by climate change) for working-class social reproduction and political struggle. He also leads an LSE research team in partnership with four UK charities in the ‘A Future For All’ project, which is developing a new initiative to facilitate climate movement participation by UK parents from low-income communities and parents of disabled children.

Prof Apostolidis’s previous major research projects have explored predicaments of socioeconomic precarity, mechanisms of biopolitics, dynamics of anti-migrant hegemony, and processes of working-class organising through fieldwork with Latino/a day labourers and meatpackers in the US. His early research analysed the cultural politics of the US Christian Right through a critical approach derived from Theodor W. Adorno, and he has also written extensively in cultural studies, including on issues of gender, sexuality and power. Prof Apostolidis’s work critically engages diverse 20th-21st century thinkers including Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, Kathi Weeks, Wendy Brown, Paulo Freire, Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, Lauren Berlant, Giorgio Agamben, and others.

Prof Apostolidis is the author of The Fight for Time: Migrant Day Laborers and the Politics of Precarity (Oxford University Press 2019), Breaks in the Chain: What Immigrant Workers Can Teach America about Democracy (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), and Stations of the Cross: Adorno and Christian Right Radio (Duke University Press, 2000), as well as co-editor of Public Affairs: Politics in the Age of Sex Scandals (Duke University Press, 2004). He is on the editorial boards of the journals Political Theory and Emancipations, he co-edits the book series ‘Studies in Subaltern Latina/o Politics’ for Oxford University Press, he is affiliated with the LSE’s Phelan United States Centre, and he is a Director of the Radical Critical Theory Circle. Prof Apostolidis recently had the role of Visiting Expert Scholar with the Mellon-funded research project ‘Latinx Futures: The Civil, Cultural and Political Stakes for Southern California Latinx Communities,’ based at the University of California Riverside from 2021-2025.

Prof Apostolidis provides academic leadership for student civic engagement at the LSE in his role as Academic Lead for CIVICA: The European University of Social Sciences. He is an innovator in the design of impact-oriented student research projects, including partnerships with NGOs on environmental and labour issues for undergraduates in his course GV262 Contemporary Political Theory. For taught Masters’ students, he teaches GV4L4 Critical Theory & Political Action and GV498 Multiculturalism. Prof Apostolidis promotes the development of outstanding research-led and public-oriented education at the LSE through his education-focussed role.

Prof Apostolidis holds the PhD and MA from Cornell University and the AB from Princeton University.