Intellectual, journalist, government official and professor. He is known for his theorization of mediology, a critical theory of the long-term transmission of cultural meaning in human society; and fo…
Paul-Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationships between power and knowledge,…
Émile Zola was a prominent French novelist, journalist, and playwright widely regarded as a key figure in the development of literary naturalism. His work profoundly influenced both literature and soc…
Arthur Schopenhauer was born in the city of Danzig (then part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth; present day Gdańsk, Poland) and was a German philosopher best known for his work The World as Will …
Guy Ernest Debord was a French theorist, writer, filmmaker, hypergraphist and founding member of the groups Lettrist International and Situationist International. In broad terms, Debord's theories att…
Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant was a popular 19th-century French writer. He is one of the fathers of the modern short story. A protege of Flaubert, Maupassant's short stories are characterized by…
Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, 1st Marquess of Vargas Llosa, more commonly known as Mario Vargas Llosa, was a Peruvian novelist, journalist, essayist, and politician. Vargas Llosa was one of the Span…
Virginie Despentes is a French writer, novelist and filmmaker, born in Nancy, Meurthe-et-Moselle. Her most famous novel, and film of the same name is Baise-moi, a contemporary example of the exploitat…
Stuart Hall was an influential Jamaican-born British sociologist and cultural theorist. He was Professor of Sociology at the Open University, the founding editor of New Left Review, and Director of th…
Born in 1911 in Rășinari, a small village in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, raised under the rule of a father who was a Romanian Orthodox priest and a mother who was prone to depression, Emil Ci…
Ernesto "Che" Guevara, commonly known as El Che or simply Che, was a Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, intellectual, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist. A major figure of the Cu…
Christopher Robert Browning recently retired as Frank Porter Graham Professor of History at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. He is the author of numerous books on Nazism and the Holocaust…
Vercors was the pen name of Jean Marcel Bruller, taken from a French province where Bruller fought during the early stages of the Second World War. During the Nazi occupation of France in the 1940s, V…
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Vladimir Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, leader of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks), statesman and political theorist. After the Oct…
Rachel Kushner is the bestselling author of three novels: the Booker Prize- and NBCC Award–shortlisted The Mars Room; The Flamethrowers, a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times top…
Olympe de Gouges, born Marie Gouze, was a French playwright and political activist whose feminist and abolitionist writings reached a large audience. She became an outspoken advocate for ameliorating …
Ernst Jünger was a decorated German soldier and author who became famous for his World War I memoir Storm of Steel. The son of a successful businessman and chemist, Jünger rebelled against an affluent…
A master of poetry, drama, and the novel, German writer and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe spent 50 years on his two-part dramatic poem Faust, published in 1808 and 1832, also conducted scie…
Olga Nawoja Tokarczuk is a Polish writer, activist, and public intellectual. She is one of the most critically acclaimed and successful authors of her generation in Poland. She was awarded the 2018 No…
A social psychologist, sociologist, and amateur physicist. He was the author of several works in which he expounded theories of national traits, racial superiority, herd behavior and crowd psychology.…
Byung-Chul Han, also spelled Pyŏng-ch'ŏl Han (born 1959 in Seoul), is a German author, cultural theorist, and Professor at the Universität der Künste Berlin (UdK) in Berlin, Germany.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca (often known simply as Seneca or Seneca the Younger); ca. 4 BC – 65 AD) was a Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, and dramatist of the Silver Age of Latin literature. He was tuto…
Jonathan Blitzer is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He has won a National Award for Education Reporting as well as an Edward R. Murrow Award, and was a 2021 Emerson Fellow at New America. He lives w…
