BASAK KUS

Associate Professor of Government, Wesleyan University

Basak Kus is an Associate Professor of Political Economy, Law, and Public Policy at Wesleyan University. She obtained her PhD from UC Berkeley, and prior to joining Wesleyan, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Yale and Princeton universities and taught political economy and public policy at University College Dublin in Ireland. She was the 2024 Scholar in Residence at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne.

Professor Kus teaches and writes about the interplay between the state, capitalism, and democracy. Her research has explored economic crises, financialization, inequality, welfare politics, state-labor union relations, and the informal economy in various contexts, including the US, Turkey, and Europe. More recently, she has been working on several projects 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). The book examines the evolution of the state-finance relationship from the early 1970s onward, specifically in the context of the US financial crisis and subsequent political developments. Additionally, she is 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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