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| Lois McNay | |
|---|---|
| Name | Lois McNay |
| Birth date | 1950s |
| Birth place | New York City, United States |
| Occupation | Political theorist; Professor |
| Known for | Studies of neoliberalism, subjectivity, citizenship, feminism |
| Alma mater | Hunter College; City University of New York; University of Massachusetts Amherst |
| Workplaces | Hunter College; Graduate Center, City University of New York |
Lois McNay Lois McNay is an American political theorist and scholar of contemporary political thought known for her analyses of neoliberalism, subjectivity, citizenship, and feminist theory. Her work engages canonical and contemporary figures across Michel Foucault, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, and Nancy Fraser to interrogate transformations in political subjectivity under late capitalism. McNay has held academic posts at public institutions and contributed to interdisciplinary debates spanning political theory, social theory, gender studies, and cultural studies.
McNay was born in New York City in the 1950s and raised in an urban milieu shaped by postwar social movements and municipal politics involving figures like Fiorello H. La Guardia and later developments in New York City governance. She completed undergraduate studies at Hunter College before pursuing graduate education at the City University of New York Graduate Center, with doctoral work that engaged historians and theorists including Theodor W. Adorno, Max Weber, Karl Marx, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. During her formation she studied alongside scholars influenced by the New Left and the emergent fields associated with the Second-wave feminism and the intellectual legacies of the Frankfurt School and British Cultural Studies.
McNay has been a faculty member at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York where she taught courses on modern political thought, feminist theory, and contemporary ethics. Her career intersects institutional contexts such as the American Political Science Association, the Modern Language Association, and cross-disciplinary centers linked to gender studies and critical theory. She participated in conferences with scholars from the London School of Economics, University of California, Berkeley, Columbia University, and University of Oxford, collaborating with thinkers associated with debates on neoliberal policy such as Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Wendy Brown. McNay has served on editorial boards for journals influenced by networks around the New Left Review, European Journal of Political Theory, and Feminist Theory.
McNay’s work critically examines how shifts in governance and market rationalities reshape the constitution of the political subject. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s analytics of power, she extends analysis to the production of individuality in contexts discussed by Max Weber, Karl Polanyi, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman. She synthesizes insights from Judith Butler on performativity, Nancy Fraser on recognition and redistribution, and Iris Marion Young on social justice to argue that neoliberal rationalities reconfigure citizenship, rights, and agency. McNay interrogates the tension between forms of collective political agency theorized by Hannah Arendt and the individualized civic formation present in accounts by John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, while engaging contemporary analyses by Pierre Bourdieu on habitus and Stuart Hall on cultural identity.
Her research maps transformations in welfare regimes and public goods across case studies invoking policy debates linked to the New Deal, Thatcherism, Reaganomics, and post-2008 austerity politics associated with European Union fiscal regimes. McNay situates feminist critiques beside debates on multiculturalism as defended by thinkers like Charles Taylor and Will Kymlicka, and juxtaposes those with critical interventions from bell hooks and Simone de Beauvoir. She also interrogates neoliberal subjectivities through intersections with labor precarity featured in literature by Guy Standing and discussions of biopolitics from Giorgio Agamben.
McNay’s books and essays engage a wide intellectual field and have been cited across the humanities and social sciences. Key works include analyses of neoliberalism, subjectivity, and feminist politics that dialogue with texts by Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Nancy Fraser, Hannah Arendt, and John Stuart Mill. Her monographs and edited volumes have been published by university presses and featured in symposia alongside contributions from scholars at Harvard University, Princeton University, Yale University, University of California, and The New School. McNay’s scholarship appears in journals connected to the Modern Language Association, the American Political Science Association, and the Association for Feminist Ethics and Social Theory.
McNay has received recognition from academic bodies including awards and fellowships associated with the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and disciplinary prizes awarded by the Political Studies Association and the Society for Women in Philosophy. Her scholarship has been honored in lectureships and visiting professorships at institutions such as the London School of Economics, University of Oxford, Yale University, and the University of Toronto. She has been invited to speak at fora hosted by organizations like the Brookings Institution, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Open Society Foundations.
McNay’s personal trajectory intertwines with networks of feminist activism and public scholarship connected to figures such as Angela Davis, Rosalynn Carter, and Ellen Wilkinson through historical resonances. Her mentorship shaped generations of scholars who now work across institutions including Hunter College, the Graduate Center, CUNY, SOAS University of London, University of Edinburgh, and University of Melbourne. Her legacy is reflected in ongoing citations in debates concerning neoliberalism, citizenship, and feminist political theory alongside canonical interventions by Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Nancy Fraser, Hannah Arendt, and Pierre Bourdieu.
Category:American political theorists Category:Feminist theorists Category:City University of New York faculty