Kristin Plys is an Associate Professor of Sociology and History at the University of Toronto

specializing in the political economy and social history of the Global South. Her research draws on Marxist and critical theory to trace how workers, intellectuals, artists, and poets built resistance to capitalism and authoritarian rule, with particular focus on the 1970s anti-imperialist left and its legacies.

She is the author of Brewing Resistance (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. Her forthcoming monographs include Marxist Theory and Social History (August 2026) and Ghosts of National Liberation: Post-Fascist Repetition and the Contradictions of Anti-Imperialist Geoculture (February 2027), and she is co-author with Charles Lemert of the forthcoming eighth edition of Social Theory: The Multicultural, Global, and Classic Readings. Her work sits at the intersection of historical sociology, political economy, and social theory, contributing to comparative and global scholarship on labour, dictatorship, and historical capitalism.

Plys received her PhD from Yale University and her BA (with honors) from Johns Hopkins University, and held an earlier research position at Princeton University. She has held visiting positions at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Jawaharlal Nehru University, the Centre for Development Studies in Thiruvananthapuram, and the Lahore University of Management Sciences. From 2023–24 she was the J. Clawson Mills Scholar at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and since 2026 has been a faculty associate of Marxist Studies in Global and Asian Perspectives (MSGAP) at York University.