Niklas Plaetzer is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. His research interests include democratic theory, the history of political thought, constitutionalism, critical theory, and the politics of social movements.

A native of Münster, Germany, Niklas previously studied at Sciences Po Paris, with a year on exchange at Columbia University, where he earned a B.A. in interdisciplinary social sciences and an M.A. in political science (2015 and 2017, both summa cum laude).

At the University of Chicago, Niklas's dissertation (co-chaired by Prof. Linda Zerilli and Prof. John McCormick), entitled The Plebeian International, aims to rethink the relation between social movements and democratic order beyond the nation-state. It traces the border-crossing projects of workers, women, and abolitionists in the Atlantic world of the 1830s-1880s, with a focus on France and Brazil. Through the lens of the Roman concept of the plebs – evoking a republicanism of dominated groups, set against elites –, the dissertation recovers projects for a “universal republic” from social movements and marginalized thinkers who opposed a world of consolidating nation-states. The Plebeian International thus reveals hidden entanglements between early working-class internationalism, the republican tradition, and the history of legal pluralism, which point to an alternative approach to democratic institutions today.

Niklas's peer-reviewed work has appeared in Contemporary Political Theory (2024), Political Theory (2023), Modern Intellectual History (2023), Historical Materialism (2022), Nineteenth-Century French Studies (2021), and the volume Creolizing Hannah Arendt (ed. Neil Roberts and Marilyn Nissim-Sabat, Rowman & Littlefield, 2024), among other venues. Together with Katia Genel (Université Paris Nanterre), he is the co-editor of Croisements critiques : L'actualité de l'École de Francfort (Le Bord de l'eau, 2023).

In 2024-2025, Niklas was a Doctoral Fellow at the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights, after spending the spring of 2024 at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He has taught classes at the University of Chicago, Sciences Po Paris, the Université Paris-Est Créteil, and Humboldt University in Berlin.

For more information, please visit his website at https://niklasplaetzer.com/.