Matthew Longo is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Leiden University.

More information about Matthew Longo

Matthew Longo is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Leiden University, where he teaches political theory. His work focuses on problems of borders and migration, with a thematic interest in questions of sovereignty, authority and freedom. He also runs an annual conference on the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt.

He is the author of two books, The Picnic: A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain (W.W. Norton, 2024), which won the 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Writing, and The Politics of Borders: Sovereignty, Security, and the Citizen after 9/11 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), which won the 2018 Charles Taylor Book Award (APSA).

Before joining the faculty at Leiden, he was Clayman Junior Research Fellow in Politics and Political Ideas at St Anne’s College, Oxford. He received his PhD from Yale University, and is the recipient of the 2016 Leo Strauss Award for Best Dissertation in Political Philosophy, given by the American Political Science Association.

You can follow him on Twitter @matthewblongo.

PhD supervision

Matthew Longo is available to supervise PhD students and invites PhD research proposals in the areas of:

• migration & borders
• political theory/philosophy
• interpretive methods

See for more information on PhD positions:

› Institute of Political Science: PhD

Publications