Professor Ruth Kinna

Ruth is a political theorist and historian of ideas with interests in historical and contemporary anarchism, nineteenth and early twentieth-century socialist thought, utopianism and political militancy.

Ruth graduated from Queen Mary, University of London with a 1^st class degree in History and Politics. She completed her doctoral research at Nuffield College, Oxford.

She is co-founder of Loughborough’s Anarchism Research Group and co-founder and co-convenor (2005-2018) of the Anarchist Studies Network (a specialist group of the Political Studies Association) and with Matthew S. Adams, co-editor of the peer review journal Anarchist Studies.

A long-standing member of UCU and former Department’s rep., she is a member of the Loughborough Branch UCU’s campaigns and workload teams.

Awards:

2024-25 British Academy, ‘Rose Pesotta: Transnational Mobilising in the USA 1921-1927’

2023-24 ISRF Mid-Career Fellowship

2020 Shortlisted for 2020 for the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing

2017 Santander Mobility Award

2016 Higher Education Innovation Funding

2016 ESRC Transformative Research Award 

2015 ISRF ‘Art, Activism and Political Violence’

2003-04 British Academy, ‘Early Writings on Terrorism’

1993 British Academy ‘Mutual Aid in Historical Context’

1983-86 SSRC studentship

1982 Drapers’ Prize, Queen Mary University of London

Media:

Radio: BBC Radio 4 In Our Time,  Start the Week,

BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking, BBC Parliament, BOOKtalk

Festivals: How the Light Gets In 2021 and 2023, Idler 2023.

Print: The Conversation, Strike! Magazine, The Big Issue, Novara Media and Dope.

Online: Five Books on Anarchism,  Russell Brand’s Under the Skin, Everyday Anarchism, Jay Shapiro – Dilemma Podcast, Dan Snow’s History Hit, Owen Bennett-Jones New Books Network, Carne Ross’s Substack

Academic publishing:

Ruth’s first monograph William Morris: The Art of Socialism, was published in 2000 with University of Wales Press. In 2016, she published Kropotkin: Reviewing the Classical Anarchist Tradition with University of Edinburgh. Her most recent book, co co-authored with Alex Prichard (Exeter), provisionally titled, Constitutionalising Anarchy: Individual Sovereignty, Association, Non-Domination, is forthcoming in the LSE/CUP International Studies Book Series.

Ruth is editor of the Continuum/Bloomsbury Companion to Anarchism (2012/14) and co-editor of Anarchism and Utopianism (Manchester University Press, 2009 with Laurence Davis), Libertarian Socialism: Politics in Black and Red (Palgrave & PM Press, 2012/2017 with Alex Prichard, Saku Pinta and David Berry), Anarchism 1914-18: Internationalism, Anti-militarism and War (Manchester University Press, 2017 with Matthew S. Adams), Handbook of Radical Politics (Routledge, 2019 with Uri Gordon) and Cultures of Violence (Routledge, 2020 with Gillian Whiteley).

Public scholarship:

Ruth is the author of two introductions to anarchism - The Beginner's Guide to Anarchism (Oneworld, 2005/2009) and The Government of No One (Pelican, 2019) – and the pamphlet series Great Anarchists (Dog Section Press, 2020). She is co-author with Seeds for Change, Alex Prichard and Thomas Swann of Anarchic Agreements, a guide to anarchist constitutionalising. Her fruitful collaboration with Alex Prichard on the constitutionalising anarchy project generated REF2021 Impact Case Studies at Loughborough and Exeter.

She participated in the convivial cross-disciplinary Politicized Practice Research Group and, collaborating with Loughborough colleagues Gillian Whiteley and Fred Dalmasso, helped facilitate the Reimagining Citizenship Activity Book and the linked exhibitions at Loughborough and the European Culture Centre, at the 2019 Venice Biennial.

She is editor of the forthcoming Penguin Book of Anarchism.

Internal management:

• 2015 Academic partner in the Consent initiative, with Loughborough Students Union Women’s Network
• 2011-17 Member, Validation Committee British University in Egypt
• 2011-14 Associate Dean for Teaching, School of Social, Political and Geographical Science.
• 2010-11 Associate Dean for Teaching, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities
• 2005 University teaching prize

Public engagement:

• 2024 How to be an anarchist, a short course for the Idler. 
• 2021 Incite seminars
• 2020 The anarchy night school – Five Weeks of Anarchy hosted by Five Leaves Bookshop, Nottingham
• 2019 Massolit lectures on anarchism for A level politics
• 2015/2019 Co-author with Uri Gordon of the Political Studies Association Teachers’ Topic Guide on Anarchism and Ideology.

Ruth was the School’s inaugural Director of Postgraduate Programmes and has supervised 16 doctoral researchers. She has been appointed external examiner for 17 PhD theses in the UK and internationally.

She is co-supervising three doctoral researchers:

• Isobel van Hagen, “Practical Anarchist Approaches to Gendered Violence in the ‘Alegal’ Space”
• William Godfrey: “Towards a materialist animal liberation”
• Sam Garrett: “Political subjectivity and identity politics in contemporary radical organisation’

Ruth sits on PhD committees at the California Institute of Integral Studies, University of Helsinki, and University Paul Valéry, Monpellier 3. She has been a member of supervision committees at the University of Guelph and Federal University of Santa Catarina. 

• ‘Anarchism and Communalism: The Defeat of the Commune and the Rise of Communal Anarchism’, in van der Zweerde, Kets and van de Sande (eds.) Communalism as a Democratic Repertoire: From the Paris Commune to the Present (Routledge, 2025).
• Kropotkin and the Anarchist Case for Penal Abolition’ in David Scott (ed.) Abolitionist Voices, (Bristol University Press, 2025).
• Simon Stevens and Ruth Kinna, R. ‘Anarchism: war, violence and scapegoating’. Contemporary Political Theory, online first, 2024.

• José Gutierrez and Ruth Kinna, ‘Anarchism and the National Question: Historical, Theoretical and Contemporary Perspectives’ Introduction to the Themed Section in Nations and Nationalism, 29 (1), 2023: 121-130
• ‘Emma Goldman’ in Manjeet Ramgotra and Simon Choat (eds) Rethinking Political Thinkers (Oxford University Press, 2023)
• Ruth Kinna, Alex Prichard, Thomas Swann and Seeds for Change (co-ed) Anarchic Agreements: A Field Guide to Collective Organizing, (PM Press, 2022) 
• ‘Peter Kropotkin and Communist Anarchism’, in Marcel van der Linden (ed.) Cambridge History of Socialism, (Cambridge University Press, 2022) 331-354
• ‘What is Anarchist Internationalism?’ Nations and Nationalism, 27 (4) (2021): 976-991