Marshall Pierce is a PhD Candidate in Political Theory at the University of Chicago. His research engages the historical legacy and contemporary resonance of proletarian and plebeian democracy, with emphases on the politics of labor, the dynamics of class composition, and the dialectics of political defeat and reinvention.

In 2024-2025, Marshall was an exchange fellow at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. His work has been supported by the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights and the Institute for International Research at the John W. Boyer Center of the University of Chicago, Paris. He has published in both peer-reviewed academic journals and public-facing venues, including History of European Ideas and Jacobin.

In 2025, Marshall was awarded the University of Chicago’s Joseph Cropsey Prize for Best M.A. Thesis in Political Philosophy and Political Theory and the University of Chicago’s Anderson Family Prize for Best M.A. Thesis in Political Science.

Marshall began his PhD after completing a B.A. in Liberal Studies at Portland State University in 2022. Before beginning his undergraduate studies, he worked for almost ten years as a carpenter and painter.

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