Joan C. Williams Keynote Speaker

Described as “legendary” by the New Yorker and as having “something approaching rock star status” by the New York Times Magazine, Joan C. Williams is a prominent public intellectual whose 12 books have been translated into French, Japanese, Korean, Hungarian and Danish. Her research appears in law, sociology, medicine, social psychology and management journals.

Williams’ forty years of work on race, gender and social class include a TED talk with 1.3 million views. Her influential work on class includes Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back (2025), which was nominated for the Financial Times’ Best Business Book of the Year. Her White Working Class (2017) was one of the three books Joe Biden carried, dog-eared and annotated, during his 2020 presidential campaign. Her 2016 Harvard Business Review article “What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class” garnered 3.7 million views—then the most in HBR’s 90-year history. She has published op-eds or been profiled in The New York Times, Financial Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Politico, The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere.

Williams explains why far-right populism takes such similar forms across the world. Her exploration of the cultural dimensions of the far right’s success have led to engagements to speak at Wall Street Journal CEO Council Summit and to legislators in the US, UK and Denmark and the. Her concrete guidance to companies has led to over 35 articles she has published in Harvard Business Review. She offers insights into how individuals, political parties, governments and philanthropies can navigate the current fraught political moment.