I am currently a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Political Science Department at the College of Arts & Letters at the University of Notre Dame.

My research engages critical theory, political theology, and revolutionary and juridical textual archives to offer new perspectives on the canon of political theory in the context of popular collective action. My first book project, Profane Heaven: Utopia, Apocalypse, and the Politics of the Imagination, proposes a novel theory of utopia through reinterpretations of the fundamental texts of Early Modern political thought.

I hold a PhD in political science from The Graduate Center, CUNY, an MA in Politics from the New School for Social Research, and a BA in Liberal Studies with a Politics concentration from Eugene Lang College.

My academic writings have appeared in Political Theory, History of the Present, Utopian Studies, and Theory & Event. My research has been supported by the Futures Initiative, the CUNY Dissertation Fellowship, the Graduate Teaching Fellowship, the Open Knowledge Fellowship, and the Writing Across the Curriculum Fellowship. I received the Arthur O. Lewis Award for the best paper by a younger scholar from the Society of Utopian Studies.

You can reach me at olsilverman at nd dot edu.