William Whitham

William Whitham will be Assistant Professor of Humanities starting in Fall 2024. Previously he was Lecturer in the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies at Harvard, where he won a number of teaching awards. His research lies at the intersection of political ideas, mass organizations, and governance in modern Europe and Russia/Eurasia within a global framework. His work has been published in Modern Intellectual History, Kritika and Utilitas.

Current Project

Whitham’s current book project, Statism and Anarchy: The Politics of Subversion in Spain, Italy, and the Soviet Union, studies how anarchists and state officials shaped one another as they competed for political influence across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Education

• Ph.D. in History, Princeton University, 2021
• M.A. in History (with distinction), Princeton University, 2017
• M.Phil., in Political Thought and Intellectual History (with distinction), University of Cambridge, 2015
• B.A. in Social Studies (summa cum laude), Harvard University, 2014

Publications - Articles

“Lenin, the Anarchist? A Constructive Misinterpretation’, Kritika 24:3 (2023), 791–816.

“César De Paepe and the ideas of the First International,” Modern Intellectual History 16:3 (2019), 897-925.

“A reconsideration of John Stuart Mill’s account of political violence,” Utilitas 26:4 (2014), 409-431.