On Leave
Campus
- Mississauga (UTM)
Cross-Appointments
Fields of Study
- Africa
- Cultural and Intellectual
- Empires, Colonialisms and Indigeneity
- Food
- Mediterranean and Middle East
- Social
- South Asia
Areas of Interest
Political Economy; Postcolonial Theory; Marxism; Capitalism; Colonialism/Imperialism; Social History of Art; Economic History; Labour/Left History; Food History; Histories of the Café Culture; Urban History; Oral History; The Global South; Global & Transnational History; Comparative History; Modern Islamic Social History; Modern South Asia (India & Pakistan)
Biography
Kristin Plys is the J. Clawson Mills Scholar at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for 2023-24 and Associate Professor of Sociology and History at the University of Toronto. She received her PhD from Yale University and BA (with honors) from the Johns Hopkins University. Before beginning her PhD, she was a research specialist in the Department of Economics and School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. She has held visiting positions at the Georg-August-Universität-Göttingen in Germany, the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, the Centre for Development Studies in Thiruvanathapuram, India, and the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Pakistan. Her expertise is in political economy, dictatorship in the 1970s Global South, poetry, visual art, and politics in the 1970s Global South, labor history, histories of café culture, and historical method. She is author of Brewing Resistance: Indian Coffee House and the Emergency in Postcolonial India (2020), winner of the Global Sociology Book Award from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, and co-author with Charles Lemert of Capitalism and its Uncertain Future (2022), honorable mention for the PEWS Immanuel Wallerstein Memorial Book Award.
BOOK CHAPTERS:
Kristin Plys (Forthcoming). “Coffee House Workers” in Subin Dennis and Vijay Prashad Eds. Communist Histories Vol. 2. New Delhi: LeftWord Books.;
Kristin Plys (2021). “Postcolonial Autonomous Zones: Urban Spaces of Opposition to Authoritarian Rule in Lahore and Delhi during the Ziaul Haq and Indira Gandhi Regimes” in Amen Jaffer and Mashal Saif Eds. State and Subject Formation in South Asia Karachi: Oxford University Press, pp. 275-298. ;
BOOK REVIEWS & COMMENTS:
Kristin Plys. (2021). “The Continued Relevance of Pan-African Marxism in a Time of Crisis” Global Afrikan Congress International;
Kristin Plys. (2021). “Art Against Imperialism in ’80s Pakistan: A Photo Essay” Jamhoor 26th April. ;
Kristin Plys. (2020). “Repression and Resistance of India’s Student Movement” ROAR Magazine 28th October.;
Kristin Plys. (2020). “Spaces of Resistance: From Indian Coffee House to Tihar Jail” Jamhoor 21st October. ;
Kristin Plys. (2020). “Authoritarianism and Anti-Muslim Violence: Comparing The Emergency to Today’s ‘Undeclared Emergency’” The Wire 29th September ;
Kristin Plys. (2020). “Global Authoritarianism and Anti-Muslim Violence: India’s Emergency (1975-7) in Comparative Historical Perspective” Critical Historical Sociology: History, Theory and Sociology in an Age of Crisis 20th August ;
Kristin Plys. (2020). “The Romance of Revolution in Emergency-Era Delhi” Jamhoor 27th June ;
Kristin Plys. (2018). “Book review of India, Modernity and the Great Divergence by Kaveh Yazdani,”Journal of World-Systems Research 24(1): 247-253. ;
Kristin Plys. (2017). “Book review of On Pauperism Present and Past by Jan Bremen,” Global Labour Journal 8(3): 248-251.;
Kristin Plys. (2015). “Book review of Workers’ Self-Management in the Caribbean: The Writings of Joseph Edwards by Joseph Edwards,” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 56(3-4): 299-301.;
Kristin Plys. (2014). “Book review of The Darjeeling Distinction by Sarah Besky,” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 55(4): 345-347
Education
Publications
- “Theories of Capitalism and Coloniality in World Systems Analysis, the Dar es Salaam School of History and the New Indian Labour History” ( : 2023)
- “Theories of Antifascism in the Interwar Mediterranean: Autonomous Workers Movements and the Café Culture in Italy & Tunisia, 1922-1945, Part II ( : 2022)
- “Political Work on a Cultural Front: The Postcolonial Avant-garde of Lahore’s Pak Tea House during the Zia Military Dictatorship (1977-1988)” ( : 2022)
- “Nostalgia for Futures Past: The 1970s Global Left in Naeem Mohaiemen’s Afsan's Long Day (2014)” ( : 2022)
- “Theories of Antifascism in the Interwar Mediterranean: Fascism in the Longue Durée, Part I” ( : 2022)
- Capitalism and Its Uncertain Future (Routledge : 2021)
- “Theorizing Capitalist Imperialism for Anti-Imperialist Praxis: Towards a Rodneyan World Systems Analysis,” ( : 2021)
- Brewing Resistance: Indian Coffee House and The Emergency in Postcolonial India (Cambridge University Press : 2020)
- “The Poetry of Resistance: Poetry as solidarity in postcolonial anti-authoritarian movements in Islamicate South Asia” ( : 2020)
- “Time and World-History” ( : 2020)
- “Violence as a Tactic of Social Protest in Postcolonial India: From the Railway Workers’ Strike to the Baroda Dynamite Conspiracy, 1974-6” ( : 2019)
- “Subaltern Historiography, the Working Class, and Social Theory for the Global South” ( : 2019)
- “Political Deliberation and Democratic Reversal in India: Indian Coffee House during The Emergency (1975-77) and the Third World 'Totalitarian Moment’” ( : 2017)
- “Immanuel Wallerstein” (New York: Oxford University Press : 2016)
- “Worker Self-Management in the Third World, 1952-1979” ( : 2016)
- “Financialization, Crisis, and the Development of Capitalism in the United States” ( : 2014)
- “Eurocentrism and the Origins of Capitalism” ( : 2013)
- “World Systemic and Kondratieff Cycles” ( : 2012)
- “Political Work on a Cultural Front: The Postcolonial Avant-garde of Lahore’s Pak Tea House during the Zia Military Dictatorship (1977-1988),” ()