Professor Orin Kirshner

Narrative Biography

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Orin attended the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington where he studied American politics and political economy and wrote a senior thesis exploring the impact of democratic-popular movements on the state's economic development from the 1880s-1940s. After graduating from Evergreen in 1984 Orin spent three years organizing family farmers and the working poor in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa. He then attended the New School for Social Research in New York City, graduating with a Ph.D. in Political Science in 1994 with concentrations in American politics and international political economy and an expertise in U.S. global trade politics and policy. Eager to return to the movement, after receiving his doctorate Orin was hired as a Senior Fellow by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) - one of the key NGOs that organized the anti-NAFTA and the anti-WTO campaigns in the United States. From 1996 until he was hired by SUA in 2006 Dr. Kirshner taught at the University of Minnesota, Macalester College, and the Johns Hopkins University-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies (PRC, 1998-2001); he also served as executive director of the Global Environment & Trade Study (GETS), was founder and director of the New World Institute, and worked as an itinerate Foreign Expert at the Wuhan University WTO Studies School.  Orin is currently completing a book manuscript, "Triumph of Globalism: Superpower Trade Politics and American Democracy," that probes the impact of America's postwar drive to construct an open world trading system on the nation's democratic domestic political regime.