John Kurt Jacobsen is Lecturer in the Social Sciences and has been a Research Associate or Associate in the Political Science Department since the mid-1980s. He has held visiting posts at the Centre of the Study of Science, Technology and Medicine at Imperial College London, the London School of Economics, Duke University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Rutgers University. He is author of Chasing Progress in the Irish Republic (Cambridge University Press, 1994), Dead Reckonings: Ideas, Interests and Politics in the ‘Information Age’ (Prometheus Press 1997), Technical Fouls: Democratic Dilemmas and Technological Change (Routledge, 2000), Maverick Voices (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), No Clean Hands (Ushba Press, 2006), coeditor with Lloyd I. Rudolph of Experiencing the State (Oxford University Press, 2006), Freud’s Foes: Psychoanalysis, Science and Resistance (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), Pacification and its Discontents (Prickly Paradigm/University of Chicago Press, 2010), Parables of Permanent War (Lexington Press, 2011), Masks of Reason: International Politics and Inner Worlds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), coeditor with John D. Kelly and Marston Morgan of Reconsidering American Power: Social Sciences during the Pax Americana (Oxford University Press, 2020), coeditor with R. D. Hinshelwood of Psychoanalysis, Science and Power: Essays in Honor of Robert Maxwell Young (Routledge, 2022), and coeditor with Daniel Burston of the forthcoming Guises of Authoritarianism (Routledge).

He also has published pieces in the British Journal of Political Science, World Politics, International Studies Quarterly, Review of International Studies, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, Comparative Politics, Harvard International Review, Dissent, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Psychoanalytic Review, Journal of World Systems Research, New Political Science, Free Associations, Journal of Psychosocial Studies, Critical Sociology, L’Economie Politique, History of Psychiatry, History of the Human Sciences, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars and other journals, His journalism has appeared in the Guardian, The Observer, Le Monde Diplomatique, Economic and Political Weekly, The Independent (UK), Irish Sunday Tribune, Irish Times, Dawn, The New Leader, The Statesman, Hibernia, Chicago Reader, Chicago Tribune, New Statesman & Society and numerous other outlets. He is working with John D. Kelly on Star Spangled Reason: The American Social Sciences at War.

Since 2017 he coedits (with David Morgan) the UK-based psychoanalytic journal Free Associations, and was book review editor at Logos: A Journal of Modern Society & Culture from 2002 until 2023. He is at work on a biography and is an award-winning documentary filmmaker with half a dozen feature length credits as co-director and producer (with Warren Leming), with the latest Clancy Sigal: Lord of the Gadflies premiering in March 2023 at the American Documentary Film Festival in Palm Springs.