Brian Massumi is a Canadian political philosopher and social theorist. Massumi's research spans the fields of art, architecture, political theory, cultural studies and philosophy. He received his Ph.D in French Literature from Yale University in 1987. He is also known for English-language translations of recent French philosophy, including Jean-François Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition (with Geoffrey Bennington), Jacques Attali's Noise and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus.
Massumi collaborates with Erin Manning, director of the Sense Lab, a research-creation laboratory affiliated with the Society for Art and Technology in Montreal.. They co-edit a book series at MIT Press entitled Technologies of Lived Abstraction and are founding members of the editorial collective of the Sense Lab journal Inflexions: A Journal of Research-Creation.
Massumi is currently teaching at Université de Montréal, in the Communication Sciences Department. Brian Massumi has taught and lectured internationally at Cornell University (2010), European Graduate School (2010), University of Helsinki/Turku (2009), Goldsmiths', University of London (2008) and University of California, Los Angeles (2000). In 2009 / 2010 Brian Massumi was a Senior Scholar in Residence at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University.