Andrew Anastasi

Andrew Anastasi is a Term Assistant Professor of Sociology at Barnard College, where he teaches courses on social movements, race, ethnicity, education, theory, and activism. He also teaches in Barnard’s First-Year Experience program and serves as an affiliate faculty member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. Trained as an historical sociologist and critical theorist, his research analyzes relationships between social movements and capitalist states in the 1960s and 1970s. In his current book project, Close-Quarters Antagonism: The New Left Within and Against the War on Poverty, he uses original archival research to explain the relationship between social movement organizations such as the Black Panther Party and federal anti-poverty initiatives in the 1960s and 1970s. 

Andrew’s scholarship has appeared in Theory and Society, Journal of Historical Sociology, Critical Sociology, Black Perspectives: The Blog of the African American Intellectual History Society, The Verso Books Blog, and other venues. He is also a translator: his first book, The Weapon of Organization: Mario Tronti’s Political Revolution in Marxism (Common Notions Press, 2020), introduced Italy’s most influential postwar theorist of capitalism and the workers’ movement to Anglophone audiences. He is an editor at Viewpoint Magazine, where his writings and translations have also appeared, and he has been interviewed by publications in the U.S., U.K., Italy, and France about his research and the George Floyd uprisings of 2020. 

He has received numerous research fellowships and awards for his work, including residencies at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and in Italy at the University of Bologna’s Department of the Arts. Before joining the faculty at Barnard, he taught at Fordham University, Queens College, and in public high schools across Washington, D.C., where he also supported youth-led campaigns to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline. Andrew earned a Ph.D. in Sociology and advanced certificate in Critical Theory from the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), in 2022. He also holds a B.A. in media and cultural studies from Macalester College.