Katharine Wallerstein is an independent scholar and director of the Wallerstein Institute for World Futures. She received a PhD in Rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley under Judith Butler. Her research engages topics of aesthetics and politics; the body and desire; critical and feminist theories; French modernity; 20th century avant-gardes; and counter-hegemonic spaces, cultures, and movements. She has written about mobile shapes of subjectivity and the unmaking of bodily form in the writings of Baudelaire, Colette, Oscar Wilde, and Simone Weil, among others. Her most recent publication appeared in Feminist Modernist Studies (February 2026). She is currently writing on filmmaker Claire Denis and a book on hunger artistry, as well as an edited collection on utopic spaces and moments, and several edited volumes on Immanuel Wallerstein.
Katharine Wallerstein has taught as a doctoral student at UC Berkeley in the departments of Rhetoric, Classics, and Art, and at Duke University in the departments of History and Gender and Women’s Studies, and has been building and directing international initiatives, programs, centers, and networks in the arts and humanities, and across disciplines, for twenty-five years. In addition to the Wallerstein Institute, among other initiatives she founded and co-directs with Maurits van Bever Donker the CHCI Critical Humanities Spaces Network of the Consortium for Humanities Centres and Institutes (CHCI) (2020–present), and co-founded and ran the Global Commons Foundation with the Raqs Media Collective (2006–2011).
In addition to directing the Wallerstein Institute, she is Associate Researcher at the Centre de recherches sur les arts et le langage (CRAL) at the EHESS, Paris, and at the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of the Western Cape.
She is the daughter of Immanuel Wallerstein, and is based in Paris.