Oliver Silverman

Biography

Oliver Silverman is a Provost's Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Notre Dame, affiliated with the Department of Political Science. Their research in political theory draws on critical theory, political theology, and revolutionary and juridical archives to reinterpret fundamental texts in the history of political thought. They received their PhD from the Department of Political Science at The Graduate Center, City University of New York in 2026 and hold an MA in Politics from the New School for Social Research. 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 in the early modern period. Against dominant understandings of utopia as a figure for emancipatory imagination, the book argues that the first utopian texts–those of Thomas More, Francis Bacon, James Harrington–were elite reactions to heretical lower-class uprisings. These works furnished a new concept for the elite imagination: utopia, at once a no-place (outopos) and a good place (eutopia), a secularized heaven constitutively unattainable on earth. The book situate​s these utopian authors alongside the insurgencies they opposed: More against the commoner propagandist, Simon Fish (1529) and the German Peasants’ War (1524-1526), Bacon against early anti-enclosure riots (1596, 1607), and Harrington against the “levelling” insurgencies of the Diggers and the Ranters in the English Civil War (1642-1651).​ Profane Heaven offers both a new method of reading the canon of political thought and new interpretations of twentieth-century and contemporary political theory. Their writing has appeared in Political Theory, History of the Present, Utopian Studies, and Theory & Event.