Welcome to my webpage.

Very pleased to announce my new book – THE PICNIC: A DREAM OF FREEDOM AND THE COLLAPSE OF THE IRON CURTAIN – is now out with W.W. Norton (in the US) and Bodley Head (in the UK). In 2024 it was awarded The Orwell Prize for Political Writing!

THE PICNIC is a work of narrative non-fiction, detailing the fall of the Iron Curtain from the first major breach, in the Hungarian borderlands in August 1989, through to the fall of the Berlin Wall. It has been reviewed in the New York Times (Editor’s Choice), the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian (Book of the Day), the Observer (Book of the Week), and Slate (one of the Top Ten Books of 2023), amongst others.

Other non-fiction writing – essays and articles – have appeared in the LARB, Boston Review, Nation, as well as numerous other venues.

I am Assistant Professor of Political Science at Leiden University, where I teach political theory. My work focuses on problems of borders and migration, with a thematic interest in questions of sovereignty, authority and freedom.

My first book, THE POLITICS OF BORDERS: SOVEREIGNTY, SECURITY, AND THE CITIZEN AFTER 9/11, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. It won the Charles Taylor Book Award, and has been written up in the New Yorker and Publisher’s Weekly as well as academic journals such as Perspectives on Politics and Contemporary Political Theory.

Before joining the faculty at Leiden, I was Clayman Junior Research Fellow in Politics and Political Ideas at St Anne’s College, Oxford. I received my PhD from Yale University, and I am the recipient of the 2016 Leo Strauss Award for Best Dissertation in Political Philosophy, given by the American Political Science Association.

You can follow me on Twitter @matthewblongo.