Russ Leo studies early modern literature, philosophy, and political economy as well as theory since the 1940s, paying particular attention to labor and social reproduction as well as to the long histories of Spinozism in Marxism, psychoanalysis, and other theoretical traditions.

Leo received his PhD in 2009 from the Program in Literature at Duke University, where he also received certificates in Feminist Studies and Interdisciplinary Medieval and Renaissance Studies. He joined the English Department in 2012, after a three-year tenure as a Perkins-Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Princeton University. 

Leo’s first book, Tragedy as Philosophy in the Reformation World  (Oxford University Press, 2019) traces the emergence of distinctly philosophical ideas of tragedy, irreducible to drama or performance, inextricable from rhetoric, dialectic, and metaphysics. In its proximity to philosophy, tragedy afforded careful readers crucial insight into causality, probability, necessity, and the terms of human affect and action—that is to say, the very grounds of early modern philosophy. With these resources at hand, Reformed theologians, poets, and critics produced daring and influential theses on tragedy between the 1550s and the 1630s, all directly related to pressing Reformation debates.

Leo is currently at work on several essays and translations, all related to the critiques of institutions—the universities, churches, sovereign bodies, and emergent political parties—offered by Baruch Spinoza, his “circle,” interlocutors and fellow travelers. The manuscript, tentatively titled: Invisible Colleges, is a study of practical and imaginative efforts to develop new forms of community, politics, and exchange between the 1640s and the 1690s.  Milton and Spinoza figure prominently, and Leo resituates them in a shared historical milieu, one that begins with the utopian efforts of the Hartlib Circle and moves across the 1650s and 1660s towards the Dutch Collegiants (particularly in Amsterdam and Rotterdam), English Quakers at home and abroad, and emergent artistic and scientific societies that met in pubs and coffeehouses—all operating autonomously, with incipient critiques of extant institutions.  The book reconstructs a vibrant world that Milton and Spinoza shared. As part of this project, Leo recently completed a critical translation of the Preface to Spinoza’s 1677 Opera Posthuma/Nagelate Schriften for the forthcoming Collected Works of Spinoza, Volume III (Princeton University Press), a fascinating work by Jarig Jellesz and Lodowick Meijer that affords insight into the early international reception of the Spinoza’s ideas and legacy. Moreover, he contributed notes to a new French edition of Spinoza’s Éthique (Flammarion, 2021), edited by Maxime Rovere.

Leo is beginning work on another manuscript, tentatively titled Paleoliberalism and Racial Capitalism, a study of early modern political economy, exploring how foundational works of economic and philosophical anthropology obscure real processes of racialization, dispossession, and capture by advancing seemingly-neutral, self-evident, and ahistorical terms like “market,” “labor,” and “property.” William Petty, Johann DeWitt, John Locke, Bernard Mandeville, and various agents of English and Dutch West Indies Companies laid the groundwork for our assumptions not only about economic anthropology but about markets, value, capital, etc. “Labor” and “indigeneity” in particular emerge as signal concepts—masquerading then, as now, as self-evident and neutral.  But during this formative phase of political economy, as well as in our contemporary occasion, these are always terms that communicate abiding assumptions about race, kinship, and social reproduction. The book, moreover, examines developments in the late seventeenth and eighteenth-century Atlantic World in order to help us understand Neoliberalism and its exercises in our own moment, from employment crises to social reproduction to the ongoing expropriation of the commons.