Daniel Zimmer

Dan Zimmer is a Lecturer for Civic, Liberal, and Global Education (COLLEGE). He received a PhD in political science from Cornell University in 2022 and served for two years as a postdoctoral scholar with a joint appointment at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and the Stanford Existential Risks Initiative.

Dan’s scholarship combines Western political theory, the history of political thought, and science and technology studies to examine how the advent of planet-scale human power impacts contemporary politics, taking nuclear weapons, global heating, and artificial intelligence as its cases. At its broadest, his research explores the new kinds of political universalism that take shape when the welfare of all life on Earth begins to depend on the outcome of human decision making.

Since coming to Stanford, Dan has had the opportunity to teach interdisciplinary courses such as The Science and Politics of the Apocalypse and Earth, Space, Bits: Contesting the Nature and Future of Humanity. His first book project traces the evolving history of political universalism from Aristotle to the atom bomb to the Anthropocene.