Oliver Silverman

Oliver Silverman received their Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at The Graduate Center, City University of New York in 2026. They hold an MA in Politics from the New School for Social Research. Their research draws on critical theory, political theology, and revolutionary and juridical archives to offer new perspectives on the history of political thought. Their writing has appeared in Political Theory, History of the Present, Utopian Studies, and Theory & Event.

Their first monograph, Profane Heaven: Utopia, Apocalypse, and the Politics of the Imagination, proposes a novel theory of utopia as both political concept and genre. Against dominant understandings of utopia as a figure for emancipatory imagination, the book argues that the first utopian texts–of Thomas More, Francis Bacon, James Harrington–were reactions to heretical lower-class uprisings. These works created fictional spaces for working through fears of peasant rebellions and furnished a new concept for the elite imagination: u-topos or no-place, a secularized version of heaven that foreclosed the possibility of common life on earth. Profane Heaven reframes essential texts in the history of political thought as elite reactions to apocalyptic movements of the poor.