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Biography

Matthew Cole’s teaching and research focus on modern political thought, dystopian literature, and the politics of technology and the environment. At 91����, he has taught Source Project research streams on “The New Authoritarianism” and “Climate Justice.” He has also taught the Scholars course “Technology, Power, and Politics,” the EOP BEP course “The Politics of Dystopia,” and the FYE course “Imagining Outer Space.” These courses emerge from his research in political theory, which asks how societies imagine the future in times of crisis: from the twentieth-century traumas of totalitarianism and nuclear war to the political, technological, and ecological crises that define our century.

His first book, , asks how dystopian futures escaped the fiction section and took over political thought, tracing anxieties about totalitarian government and intrusive technology through the works of novelists, social scientists, and philosophers. His latest historical research asks what George Orwell can teach us about the psychology of power, while his present-facing projects apply one of Orwell’s signature questions – who controls the future? – to the politics of climate change, artificial intelligence, and space colonization. He has published research and review essays in Contemporary Political Theory, Environmental Politics, Perspectives on Politics, Political Research Quarterly, and The Review of Politics, and he has also contributed public writing to Boston Review and the Orwell Foundation.  
 

Education

• PhD, Duke University
• BA, Carleton College

Research Profile