Mathias Thaler is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Edinburgh. He regularly teaches courses on democratic theory, populism, human rights, the morality of war and violence, and utopianism. From 2020 to 2023, Thaler served as Co-Director of Research in the School of Social and Political Science.

He is the author of No Other Planet (Cambridge University Press 2022), Naming Violence (Columbia University Press 2018), Moralische Politik oder politische Moral? (Campus 2008), and co-editor (with Mihaela Mihai) of Political Violence and the Imagination (Routledge 2020) and of On the Uses and Abuses of Political Apologies (Palgrave 2014). His papers have appeared in leading peer-reviewed journals such as the American Political Science Review, Environmental Politics, Political Studies and Political Theory, amongst others.

Thaler’s recent research has been funded through a Marie Curie Career Integration Grant (2013–2017), a Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust (2020–2021) and an AHRC Networking Grant (2023–2024).

From September 2024 to June 2025, Thaler is in residence as a Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (Uppsala) and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (Amsterdam), working on a new project entitled Other Ends of the World are Possible. Against the view of catastrophist thinking as inherently defeatist, this interdisciplinary project examines the potential of various depictions and narrations of climate disaster across different art forms to beneficially inform political responses to anthropogenic climate change.