Dr. Brendan McGeever is a historical sociologist and is the Julian and Virginia Cornell Visiting Professor for the academic year 2024-2025. His home institution is Birkbeck, University of London where he is Senior Lecturer in Sociology. His core areas of teaching and research are in the study of antisemitism, racialization and anti-racism; the sociology of class; the study of the former Soviet Union; and Marxism and Marxist theory.

His first book, Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2019), explores the Bolshevik response to antisemitism during the Russian Revolution and Civil War. Based on archival fieldwork in Russia, Ukraine and the United States, the book uncovers how the Party grappled with the racialization of class politics in the moment of revolution. It finds that the Soviet response to antisemitism was led not by the Party leadership, as is often assumed, but by a loosely connected group of radicals who mobilized around a Jewish political subjectivity. This work was winner of the 2020 Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in History (ASEEES), the 2021 British and Irish Association of Jewish Studies Book Prize (BIAJS), the 2019 Ronald Tress Prize, and was ‘Honorable Mention’ for the 2021 Alexander Nove Book Prize (BASEES) and the 2020 W. Bruce Lincoln Book Prize (ASEEES).

As part of his wider interest in antisemitism, racism and class politics, Brendan has collaborated with Professor Satnam Virdee (University of Glasgow) on a project exploring the significance of antisemitism in the socialist movement of fin de siècle Europe (1880-1917). A collection of papers based on this work was published as a Special Issue of the journal Patterns of Prejudice in September 2017. 

His most recent book, Britain In Fragments: Why Things Are Falling Apart, was co-written with Satnam Virdee and published by Manchester University Press in 2023. This work of historical sociology traces how the pillars sustaining the democratic settlement in Britain have begun to crumble. This stability was constructed amid a century of imperial expansion abroad and working-class struggles for justice at home. The post-war welfare state was the apex of this historic arrangement; however, the ground beneath it began to shake as the processes of decolonization and neoliberalism unfolded. The book uncovers how successive Labour and Conservative governments have incrementally dismantled the democratic settlement. A bipartisan commitment to neoliberalism has culminated in a historic crisis of representation and legitimacy, opening the door to competing nationalist forces including Brexit, Scottish independence and emboldened forms of racism.

Dr. McGeever’s work has been published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, The Political Quarterly, Patterns of Prejudice and in several newspapers and magazines including the Guardian, Haaretz, The Independent and Jacobin. In 2019 he was selected as a BBC ‘New Generation Thinker’ with his work appearing on national radio.