Katrina ForresterKatrina Forrester is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Government and Committee on Social Studies at Harvard University. She is a political theorist and historian with research interests in twentieth-century and contemporary social and political theory. She is particularly interested in the history of liberalism and the left in the postwar US and Britain; Marxism, feminism, and psychoanalysis; theories of work, capitalism, and the capitalist state; and climate politics.

Forrester's first book, In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 2019) is a history of how political philosophy was transformed by postwar liberalism, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, and the rise of liberal egalitarianism. In the Shadow of Justice received the Organization of American Historians’ Merle Curti Award, the Society for US Intellectual History’s Book Award, and the Montreal Political Theory Manuscript Workshop Award, was co-awarded the International Conference for the Study of Political Thought's David and Elaine Spitz Prize, and was shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society’s Gladstone Prize and the European Consortium for Political Research's Political Theory Prize. 

Forrester's current work shifts from the study of theories that legitimate capitalist welfare states to the theories of the movements that resist them. She is now working on two related projects that begin from her interest in feminism and work. The first is a book about anti-capitalist feminist struggles 'in and against the state' in the context of deindustrialization, which develops a feminist critique of the capitalist state by exploring feminist strategies and tactics for transforming work and life, from demands, sabotage, and squatting to strikes and city councils. This research formed the basis for her Quentin Skinner Lecture, and her article "Feminist Demands and the Problem of Housework", which was the co-winner of the Okin-Young Award in Feminist Political Theory.  She is also beginning a project about dependency - its injustices, problems, pleasures, and uses for politics - which draws from feminism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. Her research has appeared in the American Political Science Review, Political Theory, Historical Journal, Modern Intellectual HistoryEuropean Journal of Political Theory, Analyse & Kritik, South Atlantic Quarterly, Review of Politics, Climatic Change, and in a number of edited volumes.  She has written on a variety of topics - including pornography, sex work, policing, surveillance, happiness, the gig economy, rentier capitalism, privacy, Bob Dylan, and Corbynism - for the London Review of BooksThe New YorkerHarper'sThe GuardianThe NationDissentn+1The New StatesmanJacobin, Boston Review, and elsewhere. She is the co-editor of Nature, Action and the Future: Political Thought and the Environment (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and of a Fall 2020 special section of Dissent on Technology and the Crisis of Work

Forrester received her PhD from the University of Cambridge and then held a research fellowship at St John's College, Cambridge and permanent lectureship at Queen Mary University of London until 2017. She was a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress in 2019-20, and the Quentin Skinner Fellow at Cambridge in 2023. At Harvard, she is a Faculty Affiliate of Studies of Women, Gender and Sexualty, the Safra Center for Ethics, the Inequality in America Initiative, and the Harvard University Center for the Environment.