Marshall Pierce is a PhD candidate in Political Theory. His work engages the history and theory of proletarian democracy, the lineages of revolutionary republicanism, and the historical sociology of institutions and social movements, with an emphasis on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 

His dissertation project recovers the revolutionary workers’ councils that emerged in Northern Italy during the Biennio Rosso (1919-1920), foregrounding the young Antonio Gramsci’s writings on councilism while positioning councilist experiments relative to theories of the general strike, the syndicalist tradition, and the rise of Italian fascism. More specifically, the project anatomizes the collapse and defeat of the workers' councils in an effort to think through enduring problems of insurgent organization under conditions of right-wing consolidation and counterrevolution. From this perspective, workers’ councils are not an institutional model to be recuperated but a theoretical aperture for examining problems of institutional endurance and fatigue, the dynamics of participatory democratic practice, the politics of dual power, and the structural pressures of reactionary opposition.

In 2024-2025, Marshall was an exchange fellow at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and a research fellow at the Institute for International Research at the University of Chicago’s John W. Boyer Center in Paris. In 2025-2026, he will be conducting archival work in Italy with sponsorship from the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights.