Timothy Brennan

Timothy Andres Brennan (born 1953) is a cultural theorist, professor of literature, public speaker, and activist.

He is known for his work on American imperialism, the political role of intellectuals, Afro-Latin music, and the problem of the "human" and the humanities in an age of technoscience.

He is an early theorist of cosmopolitanism and an oppositional voice within postcolonial studies who has challenged the prevailing trends of postmodernism and poststructuralist theory.

He has also carried on, while adapting, the intellectual leads of Edward Said, including the radical force of humanism, the poetic sociology of thinkers like Ibn Khaldun, Cola di Rienzo, and Giambattista Vico, and the generative role of Marxism in anti-colonial thought and practice.

Between his undergraduate and graduate studies, he lived on New York's Lower East Side working with political prisoner support groups, immigrant communities in the Bronx, and covering the last great miners’ strike in the late 1970s in West Virginia as a freelance reporter.

Brennan earned his BA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1976 (where he studied with the social historian, Harvey Goldberg) and his PhD from Columbia University in 1988, when he worked as an international news feature broadcaster for WKCR-FM, and debated Dinesh D’Souza on public television.

His widely cited essay, "The National Longing for Form" was published in 1990 – a defense of small-nation nationalism in an era of supposed cosmopolitanism, "a term that has often acted as cover for U.S. military adventures abroad".

In several books over the next two decades – especially, At Home in the World (1997) and Wars of Position (2006) – his career was defined by two main themes: an account of the saturation of popular culture, art, and elite discussion by imperial attitudes honed in a Cold War common sense; and the abdication of academic intellectuals, and the rise of political right, as a result of the former's dismissal of the state, its rejection of organizing, and its distrust of agency.

Two of his best-known books are Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right (2006) and Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said (2021), which won the Palestine Book Award in 2021.

This depoliticization, he argued in Borrowed Light (2014), is of a piece with a prevailing posthumanism: "to attack the maverick secularity of humanism – where critical thought is primarily found – is not to push back against conservative European legacies (as it is widely seen) but to align oneself with humanism's traditional antagonists: religious absolutism, Church censorship, and reactionary modernism."

Until 2020, the Samuel Russell Chair in the Humanities at the University of Minnesota, Brennan has taught English, world literature and intellectual history at a number of institutions, including the Humboldt University, Cornell University, and the University of Michigan.