Mathias Thaler

Fellow, SCAS.
Professor of Political Theory, University of Edinburgh

Mathias Thaler is Professor of Political Theory in the School of Social and Political Science at the
University of Edinburgh. He regularly teaches courses on democratic theory, populism, human rights,
the morality of war and violence, and utopianism. From 2020 to 2023, Thaler served as co-director
of research in the School of Social and Political Science.

He is the author of No Other Planet (Cambridge University Press 2022), Naming Violence (Columbia
University Press 2018), and Moralische Politik oder politische Moral? (Campus 2008), and co-editor
(with Mihaela Mihai) of Political Violence and the Imagination (Routledge 2020) and On the Uses and
Abuses of Political Apologies (Palgrave 2014). His papers have appeared in leading peer-reviewed journals
such as the American Political Science Review, Environmental Politics, Political Studies and Political
Theory, amongst others.

Thaler’s recent research has been funded through a Marie Curie Career Integration Grant (2013–2017),
a Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust (2020–2021), and an AHRC Networking Grant (2023–
2024). At SCAS, Thaler will begin work on a new project titled Other Ends of the World are Possible.
The escalating ecological crisis makes it imperative not only to imagine positive alternatives to the status
quo, but also to ponder the real possibility of systemic failure and collapse. Challenging the view that
catastrophist thinking is inherently defeatist, this interdisciplinary project examines the potential for various
depictions and narrations of climate disaster across different art forms to constructively inform political
responses to anthropogenic climate change.

Mathias Thaler is in residence in the autumn of 2024.
This information is accurate as of the academic year 2024-25.