ABOUT

Joe Lowndes is a scholar of American politics, with a specific focus on right-wing politics, populism, and race. Among other publications, he is the author of From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism (Yale University Press), and co-author with Daniel Martinez HoSang of Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity (University of Minnesota Press) 

Along with scholarly work, he is published frequently in public venues including the Washington Post and The New Republic. His work has been cited in The New York Times, The New Yorker Magazine, The Guardian, and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications; and he has been interviewed on National Public Radio, MSNBC, BBC Radio 4, and Al Jazeera, among others. 

He is currently co-editing a volume titled The Politics of the Multiracial Right (New York University Press in 2025).; and he is at work on another book, Adventures in Post-Democracy, which seeks to explain the growing authoritarian trend in American political culture through a chronicle of his ethnographic work in right-wing spaces over the last decade (University of California Press 2025). 

Lowndes is a Visiting Distinguished Lecturer at Hunter College. Before coming to Hunter, he was Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon.  He holds a PhD in Political Science from The New School for Social Research.

Joe Lowndes portrait
Producers Parasites Patriots, Race, and the New Right Wing Politics of Precarity

In exploring the contemporary politics of whiteness, Daniel Martinez HoSang and Joseph E. Lowndes offer a powerful analysis of white precarity embedded in an antiracist critique of white supremacy in multicultural times. Producers, Parasites, Patriots is a necessary and welcome work.

 Cristina Beltrán, New York University

Race and American Political Development by Joe Lowndes

“This important volume places race at the center of political development in America. Leading lights and fresh voices in the field sweep across the history exploring new ways to think about the impact of racial division on the shape of the political order and the dynamics of its change. There is no better introduction to this subject, one of the massive facts of the American experience.”

Stephen Skowronek, Pelatiah Perit Professor of Political and Social Science, Yale University

From the New Deal to the New Right

“Evocative and analytical, this historical portrait shows how racial change in the South opened the door to conservative mobilization. Its powerful account of how a cross-regional alliance of white supremacists and business-oriented anti-New Dealers fundamentally reoriented American politics advances our understanding not just of pathways to the present, but of prospects for the future.”

Ira Katznelson, author of When Affirmative Action Was White