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 in 2012, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Yale and Princeton universities and taught political economy and public policy at University College Dublin in Ireland.

Professor Kus teaches and writes about the interplay between the state, capitalism, and democracy. A central question drives her diverse research interests: How do governments (the US government, in particular) conceptualize and respond to crises and risks across different fields, whether it is the financial sector, climate change, or national security? To date, her research has explored topics including economic crises, financialization, the politics of credit access and inequality, the restructuring of the welfare state, and state-labor union relations in the US, Europe, and Turkey.

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 two journal special issues: a special issue of Economic and Social Review on “Politics of Financialization“ (2012), and a special issue of International Journal of Comparative Sociology on “Credit, Consumption, and Debt” (2013).

Currently, she is involved in a number of projects that explore the intersections of state, economy, and climate change. She recently co-organized an international conference on “Greening the Economy: Towards a New Political Economy” in Berlin (featured here), and is co-editing a special issue on the topic in the journal Regulation & Governance. She is also working on a book-length project tracing the historical evolution of the US climate policy from the 1970s to its current form.

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, films, and good fiction.

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

Find me on SheSource, Bluesky, Twitter, LinkedIn