Mark Bray is a historian of Modern Spain and the World, focusing on politics, human rights, and transnational history. He earned his BA in Philosophy with High Honors from Wesleyan University in 2005 and his PhD in History from Rutgers University in 2016.
He has published four books, including the national best-seller Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook (Melville House 2017), which is the first transnational history of postwar anti-fascism and has been translated into seven languages. His most recent book, The Anarchist Inquisition: Assassins, Activists, and Martyrs in Spain and France (Cornell 2022), explores groundbreaking transnational human rights campaigns that emerged in response to a brutal wave of repression unleashed by the Spanish state to quash anarchist activities at the turn of the twentieth century and is based on research in Spanish, Catalan, French, and Italian from twenty-four archives in Spain, France, England, the United States and the Netherlands. Bray is the co-editor and translator of Anarchist Education and the Modern School: A Francisco Ferrer Reader (PM Press 2018), the first definitive English-language collection of the works of early twentieth century Catalan pedagogue and revolutionary Francisco Ferrer. He is also the author of Translating Anarchy: The Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street (Zero 2013), a historically grounded, socio-political analysis of the Occupy Wall Street movement based on 192 interviews with organizers in NYC that has been translated into Spanish and French. He has presented his work in English and Spanish among public and scholarly audiences across North America, Latin America, and Europe, and has appeared on major national and international media outlets including Meet the Press, BBC World News, CNN International, PBS and many others to discuss his expertise on the history of anti-fascism, social movements, and European and American politics.
COURSES
- The Spanish Civil War
- History Workshop: Antifascism
- History Seminar: Anarchism
- History Seminar: Communism
- SAS Honors Interdisciplinary Seminar: Occupy Wall Street
- World History II
- Human Rights
- Modern Germany
- Terrorism
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
BOOKS
- The Anarchist Inquisition: Assassins, Activists, and Martyrs in Spain and France (Cornell 2022)
- Anarchist Education and the Modern School: A Francisco Ferrer Reader (PM Press 2018)
- Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook (Melville House 2017)
- Antifa: El manual antifascista (Capitán Swing 2018)
- L’anti-fascisme: son passé, son present et son avenir (Lux Editeur 2018)
- Translating Anarchy: The Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street (Zero 2013)
- La traducción de la anarquía. El anarquismo en Occupy Wall Street (Volapük Ediciones 2015)
- Occupons Wall Street. L’anarchisme d’Occupy Wall Street (Noir et Rouge Éditeur, 2014)
ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS
- “Beyond and Against the State: Anarchist Contributions to Human Rights History and Theory,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, 10.3 (Winter 2019): 323-338
- “Ricardo Flores Magón and the Anarchist Movement in Southern California” (with Yesenia Barragan), in East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte, Romeo Guzmán, Carribean Fragoza, Alex Sayf Cummings, Ryan Refts, eds. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2019)
- “Horizontalism,” in Anarchism: A Conceptual Approach, Benjamin Franks, Nathan Jun, and Leonard Williams, eds. (London: Routledge, 2018)
- “Confronting the Many Men in Suits: Rethinking the ‘Positive’ Coverage of Occupy Wall Street.” Critical Quarterly 54 (July 2012): 5-9
SELECT PUBLIC SCHOLARSHIP
- “Five myths about antifa,” Washington Post, September 11, 2020: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/five-myths/five-myths-about-antifa/2020/09/11/527071ac-f37b-11ea-bc45-e5d48ab44b9f_story.html
- “Notes for Amitai Etzioni from an Antifa Historian,” Boston Review, November 29, 2017: http://bostonreview.net/forum/bray-notes-etzioni-antifa-historian
- “Who are the antifa?” Washington Post, August 16, 2017: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/08/16/who-are-the-antifa/?utm_term=.3705e2d3971a
