Niklas Plaetzer
My work turns to the history of political thought to address problems of democratic practice. By recovering the global legacies of revolutionary republicanism among workers, women, and abolitionists in the 19th century, I hope to open up new ways of thinking about the relation between social movements and political forms, transgression and institutional durability today.
My academic writings have appeared in Political Theory, Modern Intellectual History, Contemporary Political Theory, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, and Historical Materialism, among other venues. I am currently working on two book projects – L’institution insurgeante (“The Insurgent Institution”) and The Plebeian International – that both aim to expand our institutional imagination beyond the model of the sovereign nation-state.
I obtained a PhD in political science at Sciences Po Paris in December 2025, and I am currently a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago, with an expected defense in June 2026. I hold an MA in political science from the University of Chicago (2021) as well as MA and BA degrees in political science and interdisciplinary social sciences (2017 and 2015, both summa cum laude) from Sciences Po Paris. I also hold graduate certificates in Latin American and Caribbean Studies (LACS) and Human Rights from the University of Chicago.
I was a Doctoral Fellow at the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights in 2024-2025, and an Exchange Fellow at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (spring 2024) and at the University of Bologna (summer 2025). I have previously taught classes at the University of Chicago, Sciences Po Paris, the Université Paris-Est Créteil, and Humboldt University in Berlin where I was affiliated with the Centre Marc Bloch between 2020 and 2022. I am a Graduate Associate of the Association for Global Political Thought (AGPT) at Harvard University and Associate Researcher (chercheur associé) at the Centre de recherches politiques de Sciences Po (CEVIPOF) in Paris.
You can reach me at nplaetzer@uchicago.edu.
Niklas Plaetzer 