Marshall Pierce is a PhD Candidate in Political Theory at the University of Chicago. His research engages the historical legacy and contemporary resonance of proletarian and plebeian democracy, with emphases on the politics of labor, the dynamics of class composition, and the dialectics of political defeat and reinvention.

Marshall’s dissertation project examines the rise and fall of revolutionary workers’ councils in early twentieth-century Europe. This research reconstructs both the promise and the historical defeat of efforts to construct “workers’ democracy”: insurgent forms of self-government that claimed authority over the conditions of economic and political life.

In 2024-2025, he was an exchange fellow at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. His work has been supported by the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights and the Institute for International Research at the John W. Boyer Center of the University of Chicago, Paris.