Announcing Dissent’s New Co-Editor: Patrick Iber

Announcing Dissent’s New Co-Editor: Patrick Iber

Patrick Iber will join Natasha Lewis as co-editor of Dissent.

We are sad to announce that after six years, Timothy Shenk is stepping down from his position as co-editor of Dissent, but we are thrilled to share that Patrick Iber will be joining us. You can read Patrick’s articles for Dissent here.

A note from Patrick:

I am honored to be joining Dissent as co-editor. I have been a member of the editorial board since 2017 and have contributed pieces on politics in both the United States and Latin America. Dissent is the magazine that I have always identified with most closely and whose legacy means the most to me. Providing a space for working out a reflective but committed left politics is the essential role that Dissent has played in its seventy years of publishing, and I will work to preserve that tradition for the years to come.

I was born in 1981 and grew up in rural Iowa before moving to Iowa City. Since then, I have worked in corn fields in El Salvador, as a public school math teacher in California, and as a professor on the U.S.-Mexico border. For the last seven years, I have taught in the history department at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. As a historian, I write about the intellectual and political history of the Cold War. My first book, Neither Peace nor Freedom, was about the cultural Cold War in Latin America. I will soon be finishing another project about the social sciences and the problems of poverty and inequality.

In addition to my work with Dissent, I am a contributing editor at the New Republic. I have also written for the New York Times, the Nation, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other places. In Spanish, I contribute regularly to Dissent’s partner Nueva Sociedad.

In college in the early 2000s, I was an active member of the campus antiwar movement. The hope to craft a better foreign policy for the United States, and more broadly to seek greater global justice, continues to guide my personal and professional lives. In 2020, I served as a part of the foreign policy advisory group for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, and I remain actively engaged in these areas.

My hope for Dissent in the years to come is that it will be a resource for an effective democratic left. This task requires that intellectual and political work be done together, on the foundation of a realistic assessment of our ideas, on the one hand, and the balance of forces, on the other. Dissent will always be a pluralistic space for debate and discussion. I will labor to make it a place to find resources to help our part of the political spectrum do its best work.

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