Kristin Plys

Kristin Plys is Associate Professor of Sociology and History at the University of Toronto and for 2023-4, the J. Clawson Mills Scholar in the Director’s Office at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. 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 theories of political economy, dictatorship in the 1970s Global South, the intersection of 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 from the American Sociological Association. Her current research in-progress, funded by a SSHRC Insight Grant, is on women artists in Pakistan during the military dictatorship of Zia ul Haq (1977-1988).