Will Stratford
T.A.
Will Stratford
Ph.D. Candidate
Contact
Stokes Hall South 316
Email: william.stratford@bc.edu
ORCID 0000-0002-4152-616X
Education
- B.A. Davidson College
Courses
Europe in the World I and II, The Power of Ideas/Ideas of Power II, America and the World I and II, Atlantic Worlds II, Modern History I
Research Interests
Modern European Intellectual History, Labor History, Marxism, German Social Democracy, The Second International
Advisor
Department
Biography
My interests concern the history of ideas in the modern era, especially Marxism and its concomitant labor history. I am currently pursuing research abroad for my dissertation, tentatively entitled, Pursuing Contradiction: Dialectics of German Social Democratic Marxism, 1890–1914. Against enduring myths of the vulgar, economic determinism of early Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) theory, I recover how pre-war party intellectuals endeavored to convert the ideas of the late Karl Marx into a complex body of actionable theory for mass politics. Previous scholarship has overlooked the centrality of their Marxian-Hegelian concept of capitalist dialectics—a historically specific self-contradictory totality—which informed their attempts to devise a concrete, long-term, multistep political strategy based on exacerbating class conflict.
As a graduate student at BC, I have written two research papers for publication. The first addresses America’s first Socialist congressman, Victor Berger, and aims to recover the lost history of early twentieth-century American socialism from the obscuring lenses of Progressivism, Populism, anarchism, scientism, official Communism, and American Exceptionalism. The second contextualizes Joachim Bruhn and the little-studied Antideutsche (“Anti-German”) movement of the 1990s, particularly in terms of their intellectual inheritance and divergence from the Frankfurt School’s critique of “state capitalism” from the 1930s and 1940s.
I have been a Graduate Fellow at the Clough Center for Constitutional Democracy for the 2020–2021, 2021–2022, and 2024-2025 academic years. In addition to my scholarly work, I serve as a member of the Platypus Affiliated Society, an international educational organization on the history of the left. On campus, I lead reading groups and public fora as the founding president of Platypus BC. My writings on politics, history, and the left have appeared in Weekly Worker, Sublation Magazine, and Platypus Review.
Publications
-“Rediscovering Revolutionary Socialism in America: The Marxism of Victor Berger at the Height of the Second International,” Moving the Social 68 (December 2022): 33–65.
- “Joachim Bruhn’s Leftwing Critique of Anti-Zionism and The Capitalist State in the 1990s: An Intellectual History of the Antideutsche,” New German Critique 153, 51/3 (November 2024): 125–57."