About Dr John Wolfe Ackerman
Dr Ackerman is an Assistant Professor in Politics and International Relations and Programme Director for the MSc in Digital Politics and Sustainable Development. He is a specialist in modern and contemporary political theory and also leads urban studies initiatives in Politics, International Relations, Sociology & Anthropology. He received his PhD in Political Science from Northwestern University and holds an MA in International Relations from the University of Chicago and a BA in Art History from Williams College.
email: john.ackerman@nulondon.ac.uk
Dr John Wolfe Ackerman's Research
Dr Ackerman’s research specialisms lie in contemporary political theory and the history of political and legal thought, with a focus on everyday forms of politics. He is interested in the politics of the street and cities, and all of the ways that we do politics by negotiating differences in encountering one another, both locally and globally.
His ongoing research on the German-Jewish-American refugee political theorist Hannah Arendt focuses on re-reading Arendt’s political thought through the lens of German and German-Jewish intellectual and political contexts and debates out of which Arendt’s ideas about politics emerged – especially, debates over Weimar-era political theology, on the one hand, and Arendt’s own involvement in Jewish politics in the final years of the Weimar Republic and after her arrival in New York, on the other – and rethinking the continuing implications of these ideas through their illumination by those contexts.
Dr Ackerman has held research fellowships awarded by the University of Pennsylvania’s Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, the University of Kent Law School, the German Research Foundation (DFG), the DAAD, and Northwestern University.
Dr John Wolfe Ackerman's Teaching
Dr Ackerman is currently Course Leader for Decolonising International Relations and Sustainable Cities and Communities, as well as the postgraduate Research Methods course and the postgraduate Extended Dissertation in Political Science. In the past, he has also been Course Leader for Current Issues in Cities and Suburbs; Old Powers, New Powers: Imperialism, Colonialism and the Modern State; Political Ideologies; Modern Political Thought; and the undergraduate Politics Dissertation. Dr Ackerman also contributes to teaching on the courses Foundations of Critical Thought; Green Political Thought; Political Theory in the Anthropocene (PG); and Global Politics in a Digital Age (PG).
Before coming to NU London, Dr Ackerman taught previously at the University of Kent, the TU Dresden (Germany), and Northwestern University.