MARSHALL PIERCE
Marshall Pierce is a PhD Candidate in Political Theory at the University of Chicago. His research engages the historical legacy and contemporary resonance of proletarian and plebeian democracy, with emphases on the politics of labor, the dynamics of class composition, and the dialectics of political defeat and reinvention.
In 2024-2025, he was an exchange fellow at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. His work has been supported by the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights and the Institute for International Research at the John W. Boyer Center of the University of Chicago, Paris.
ABOUT
My current dissertation project examines the rise and fall of revolutionary workers’ councils in early-twentieth-century Europe. This research reconstructs both the promise and the historical defeats of what I, following Antonio Gramsci, call “workers’ democracy”: the insurgent forms of self-government through which the working classes, broadly conceived, claim authority over economic and political life. At a deeper level, the project investigates how democratic capacities are built, organized, and frustrated, and how efforts at democratic autonomy confront — and are reshaped by — the forces of counter-revolution and reaction.
RESEARCH
Teaching
I have taught and assisted in a number of courses in Political Science and the Humanities at the University of Chicago, including an autonomously designed prize lectureship on the history and theory of social movements (Winter 2026).
My work has appeared in both peer-reviewed academic and public-facing venues, including History of European Ideas and Jacobin