Basak Kus is Professor of Government at Wesleyan University, where she teaches courses on American and comparative political economy, theories of the state, democracy, law, and public policy. She is the author of Disembedded: Regulation, Crisis, and Democracy in the Age of Finance (Oxford University Press, 2024) and numerous articles on neoliberalism, inequality and redistributive politics, financialization, and more recently climate change and green energy transitions. She is also the editor or co-editor of three special issues: "Greening the Economy: Toward a New Political Economy" in Regulation & Governance, "Politics of Financialization" in Economic and Social Review, and "Credit, Consumption, and Debt" in the International Journal of Comparative Sociology.

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Professor Kus grew up in Türkiye and completed her undergraduate studies at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. She obtained her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to joining Wesleyan, she has completed postdoctoral fellowships at Yale and Princeton universities and taught at University College Dublin. She has been a scholar in residence at Max Planck Institute in Cologne and a visiting researcher at Frei University in Berlin, Sciences Po in Paris, and the Asia School of Business in Kuala Lumpur. 

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Recently, she has started writing a weekly column for T24- the main independent online news outlet in Turkey.

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She loves the Mediterranean, Turkish coffee, Argentine tango, Italian mopeds, NY piano bars, kilim rugs, Big Band jazz, coconut ice cream, daytime naps, nighttime writing, traveling with no itinerary, watching old films, and reading contemporary fiction.

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