I am a historian, writer, and speaker based in Berlin, Germany, specializing in the cultural and intellectual history of libertarianism and the far-right in the United States, Latin America, and Europe. My research examines how neoliberal and libertarian intellectuals in the US and beyond engaged with popular culture to make their ideas about the economy accessible to wider audiences. More broadly, I am interested in the historical evolution of concepts such as "liberty" and "individualism" and their impact on contemporary political debates. I am further interested in exploring the interdisciplinary connections between economic thought, other social sciences, and the literary arts.

I earned my Ph.D. from the European University Institute in February 2025. I am currently working on turning my dissertation titled "Popularizing the Neoliberal Utopia: American Libertarian Fictions and the Quest to Design a Liberal Vision of the Future, 1930s to 1960s" into a book, which examines the impact of literary writers on the making of the libertarian movement in the US and more broadly traces the role of utopia in the liberal imagination after the Second World War.

My academic work on neoliberalism, intellectual history, and the role of popular culture in historical analysis has been published in Global Histories, the European Review of History, Cromohs, and the Journal of the History of Ideas Blog. I have also written on the contemporary libertarian right and its intellectual origins for publications such as Jacobin and the CEU Review of Books.

From 2020 to 2023, I was a co-founding member of the editorial board of the webinar series “Conversations on New Histories of Capitalism” based at the EUI and supported by the ERC-funded project ECOINT. From 2015 to 2016, I was an editor at Global Histories: A Student Journal and an organizer at the annual Global History Student Conference at Humboldt University and Free University of Berlin.

Find out more about my work on my official website or write me at hello@denniskoelling.com