Robert E. Kirsch is an interdisciplinary political theorist whose research focuses on extreme organizational change. His work addresses macro-level issues such as “doomsday prepping” movements in the United States, energy production, climate change denialism, and heterodox political economies of public finance, as well as smaller-scale questions regarding the uses and abuses of leadership development in pursuing organizational change. He draws on both Frankfurt School critical theory and American Institutionalism to examine how organizations confront crisis.
Kirsch is an Associate Editor of the journal New Political Science and co-chair of the International Herbert Marcuse Society. During the 2022–2023 academic year, he was a visiting researcher at the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies at Universität Heidelberg.
His most recent manuscript, Be Prepared: Doomsday Prepping in the United States (co-authored with Emily Ray), is available from Columbia University Press.
