Billy Holzberg is a sociologist and cultural theorist working as Lecturer in Social Justice at King’s College London. His work explores the affective and sexual politics of authoritarian nationalism. He tries to understand how and why people attach to exclusionary and often violent notions of the nation and how such border-making might be disrupted. A sociologist by training, he also draws on and intervenes in gender studies, cultural studies and international politics.

Before joining King's College London, he was a Fellow in Gender and Culture at the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics, where he also completed his PhD in the Department of Gender Studies. Billy sits on the editorial board of the Sociological Review, the steering committee of Queer@King’s, and the advisory board of SexSense. He has been a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York City and at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil.

Research

Billy Holzberg’s research is grounded in affect theory, queer feminist studies and cultural and media analysis. It harnesses the most recent advances in these fields to explore the rise of nationalism, border regimes and authoritarian politics in contemporary society:

• Affect and Emotion: Billy’s first strand of work investigates the role that affect and emotions play in fuelling nationalism and intensified border regimes. Amongst other publications, this line of research culminated in his first monograph, Affective Bordering: Race, Deservingness and Migration Control (Manchester University Press, 2025). The book uncovers how emotions like anger, fear and hope work to reproduce and contest racialised distinctions between citizen and migrant in the wake of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in Germany and won the 2025 BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize for the best first and sole-authored book in the discipline of sociology.

   

• Gender and Sexuality: His second strand of research studies how gender and sexual politics operate within authoritarian nationalist and far-right politics, and how these in turn affect gender equality and sexual freedom in society. This work led to an edited volume on transnational anti-gender politics, a special issue on the sexual politics of border control and articles on the construction of racialised sexual threat in far-right politics.

   

• Media and Digital Technology: Billy’s recent work looks more closely at the role that media and digital technologies play in the mediatisation and creation of nationalist affect and anti-migrant sentiments. Studying how conspiracy theories like that of the Great Replacement take hold in society, he conceptualises digital media platforms as affect incubators that performatively create how ‘race’, gender and sexuality are not just understood but felt and lived in society. Billy has also published widely on representations of sex and gender in contemporary media culture.

Most of Billy’s work is collaborative, interdisciplinary and transnational in scope. His work has been supported by the German National Academic Foundation, the British Academy, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Brazilian Ministry of Education and the transCampus initiative. He actively collaborates with civil society organisations, grassroots activist networks and artist collectives.

Teaching

Billy is deputy programme lead for the BA in Social Sciences. He currently convenes modules on ‘The Everyday Politics of Gender and Sexuality’, ‘Media, Culture and Society’ and ‘Civil and Political Rights’.

PhD Supervision

Billy is happy to supervise and support PhD projects on any of the following areas:

• Affect and Emotions

• Media and Digital Technology

• Queer Theory and Movements

• Bordering, Nationalism and Anti-Nationalism

• Gender and Anti-Gender Politics

• Representations of Sex, Gender and Sexuality