RESEARCH INTERESTS

European intellectual history; the human and social sciences; colonialism and postcolonialism; and the environmental humanities

BIOGRAPHY

Ryan Allen is a historian of ideas with a specialization in modern Europe and the social sciences. He came to UChicago from the University of Illinois, where he taught courses on modern European social thought, fiction and historical imagination, and decolonization. Before this, he began his collegiate teaching career in the history and religious studies departments at California State University, Los Angeles.

He works primarily in the field of modern European intellectual history. His book, Adventures in the Archaic: Primitivism, Degrowth, and the French Social Sciences, 1945–1975, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in January 2026. He has published in the journals Modern Intellectual History and History of Psychiatry on a range of subjects, including revolutionary romanticism and ethnopsychiatry.