BASAK KUS

Professor of Government, Wesleyan University

Basak Kus is Professor of Government at Wesleyan University, where she teaches political economy, law, and public policy. She earned her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and completed postdoctoral fellowships at Yale and Princeton Universities. Prior to and since her appointment at Wesleyan, she has held visiting scholar and faculty positions at University College Dublin in Ireland, the Max Planck Institute in Cologne, Sciences Po in Paris, Freie University in Berlin, and the Asia School of Business in Kuala Lumpur.

Professor Kus’s research focuses on the interplay between the state, capitalism, and democracy. She has written about economic crises, financialization, regulatory politics, politics of inequality, welfare reform, and the informal economy in various contexts, including the US, Turkey, and Europe. More recently, she has been interested in examining how governments—particularly the US government—conceptualize and respond to major crises and disruptions across different fields, such as finance, climate change, and national security, to name a few.

Professor Kus is the author of Disembedded: Regulation, Crisis, and Democracy in the Age of Finance (Oxford University Press). Working backwards from the financial crisis, the book examines the evolution of the state–finance relationship since the early 1970s and explores the links between major financial crises and subsequent political developments. Professor Kus is also the editor of three special issues: “Greening the Economy: Toward a New Political Economy” (with Gregory Jackson) in Regulation & Governance, “Politics of Financialization” in Economic and Social Review, and “Credit, Consumption, and Debt” in the International Journal of Comparative Sociology.

Professor Kus grew up in Turkey and completed her undergraduate studies at Bogazici University in Istanbul. She loves the Mediterranean, Turkish coffee, Argentine tango, Italian mopeds, NY piano bars, kilim rugs, Big Band jazz, coconut ice cream, daytime naps, nighttime writing, traveling with no itinerary, watching old films, and reading contemporary fiction.

Areas of teaching: Theories of the State; American Capitalism in a Historical and Comparative Perspective; Law and Political Economy; Emissions and the Economy; Averting Catastrophe: Public Policy and Risk Management; Research Methods.

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