Terence Renaud is a lecturer at the Institute for History. He specializes in the history of modern Europe and international social movements.

More information about Terence Renaud

Fields of interest

intellectual history, critical theory

Research

Terence Renaud's book New Lefts: The Making of a Radical Tradition (Princeton University Press, 2021) uses methods of intellectual history and critical theory to reinterpret the New Left and its historical roots in Germany and Western Europe from the 1920s through the 1960s.

His current project concerns visual representations of capitalism during the Belle Époque. Cartoons and other allegorical images proliferated in European and North American leftist newspapers between the 1890s and 1910s. Illustrations such as the Pyramid of the Capitalist System (1911) depicted the class hierarchy of industrial society in vivid terms. Circulating as cheap posters and postcards, these images formed a visual repertoire of class struggle. This interdisciplinary project is relevant to our own age of highly mediatized politics, when by contrast to the early 20th century it seems impossible to visualize the capitalist system as a whole.

Along with publishing in academic journals such as Modern Intellectual History, The Historical Journal, and New German Critique, his work has appeared in popular forums such as Aeon, The Point, Foreign Policy, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Grants and awards

Volkswagen and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations (2018–19)
Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2012–13)

CV

2022–23: Assistant Instructional Professor in Social Sciences, The University of Chicago
2019–22: Lecturer in Humanities and History, Yale University
2018–19: Visiting Researcher in History, Humboldt University of Berlin
2015–18: Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer in Humanities and History, Yale University
2012–13: Visiting Researcher, Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History (Potsdam)
2015: PhD in History, University of California, Berkeley
2010: MA in History, University of California, Berkeley
2007: BA in History, Boston University

Publications