Oliver Silverman

(they/them)

I am a PhD Candidate in political theory at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.

My research intervenes at the intersection of political theory, the history of political thought, political theology, and revolutionary political thought. My work is on the political figures of utopia and apocalypse in the history of political thought and popular revolutions of the 16th and 17th centuries.

My dissertation, Profane Heaven: Utopia, Apocalypse, and the Politics of the Imagination, offers a novel reading of utopia as a political concept. Profane Heaven stages a crucial but largely unknown encounter between the first utopian authors and their contemporary antagonists, the latter revolutionaries themselves who are often—misleadingly, I argue—hailed as ‘utopians’ by theorists and historians. Reading three of the first written utopias in context, I argue that utopia was a genre of law, constitutionalism, and accumulation in the 16th and 17th centuries. The first utopian texts transformed ideas born of earthly struggles against private property into conceptual visions of ideal worlds. Further, they furnished a new conceptual figure for the elite political imagination: utopia, a secularized version of heaven. The project explores a counter-archive of the adversaries of the first utopian authors, all of whom were partisans of apocalyptic political ideas. If Early Modern utopias worked through the genius of an individual imagining an always elsewhere, ideal state, the heretical, apocalyptic thought of the lower classes was a perfect inverse of utopia in this period. Apocalypticism’s central gesture was to join what had been separated for the purposes of social control: the inner realm and the outer social structure, heaven and earth, the head and the heart, the word and the deed, and the rich and the poor.

I hold an MA in politics from the New School for Social Research. During the 2025-2026 academic year, I am a Fellow at the Future’s Initiative. My academic writings have appeared in History of the Present, Utopian Studies, and Theory & Event and I have a forthcoming article in Political Theory.

You can reach me at lsilverman@gradcenter.cuny.edu.