Basak Kus is Professor of Government and Environmental Studies at Wesleyan University, where she teaches courses on American capitalism from a comparative perspective, the state, law, and public policy. She is the author of Disembedded: Regulation, Crisis, and Democracy in the Age of Finance (Oxford University Press) and numerous articles on neoliberalism, social policy, income and wealth inequality, redistributive politics, financialization, and, more recently, climate change and green energy transitions. She is also the editor or co-editor of three special issues: “Greening the Economy: Toward a New Political Economy” in Regulation & Governance; “Politics of Financialization” in Economic and Social Review; and “Credit, Consumption, and Debt” in the International Journal of Comparative Sociology.

 

Professor Kus grew up in Türkiye and completed her undergraduate studies at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and completed postdoctoral fellowships at Yale and Princeton Universities. Over the course of her career, she has held visiting scholar and faculty positions at University College Dublin, the Max Planck Institute in Cologne, Sciences Po in Paris, Freie Universität Berlin, and the Asia School of Business in Kuala Lumpur.

 

She loves the Mediterranean, Turkish coffee, Argentine tango, Italian mopeds, New York piano bars, kilim rugs, Big Band jazz, coconut ice cream, daytime naps, nighttime writing, traveling without an itinerary, watching old films, and reading contemporary fiction.