Banu Bargu is a scholar, teacher, writer, and editor.

Bargu is Professor of History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she is also affiliated graduate faculty in Politics and the Center for the Middle East and North Africa.

Bargu is a political theorist, whose transdisciplinary research draws upon continental philosophy, anthropology, global history, and Middle East studies around questions of the body, resistance practices, exceptional regimes, violence, and carcerality. Her most recent work investigates the phenomenology of labor and the factory.

She is the author of two award-winning books: Disembodiment: Corporeal Politics of Radical Refusal (Oxford UP, 2024), and Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons (Columbia UP, 2014).

She currently serves as the editor of Political Theory.