
Ellen Meiksins Wood FRSC (April 12, 1942 – January 14, 2016) was an American-Canadian Marxist historian and scholar. From 1967 to 1996, she taught political science at Glendon College, York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. With Robert Brenner, Ellen Meiksins Wood articulated the foundations of Political Marxism, a strand of Marxist theory that places history at the centre of its analysis. It provoked a turn away from structuralisms and teleology towards historical specificity as contested process and lived praxis. Meiksins Wood's many books and articles, were sometimes written in collaboration with her husband, Neal Wood (1922–2003). Her work has been translated into many languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, German, Romanian, Turkish, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. Of these, The Retreat from Class received the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize in 1988. Wood served on the editorial committee of the British journal New Left Review between 1984 and 1993. In 1996, she was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada, a marker of distinguished scholarship. From 1997 to 2000, Wood was an editor, along with Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy, of Monthly Review, the socialist magazine.
Series
Books

The Origin of Capitalism
A Longer View
1999

The Pristine Culture of Capitalism
A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States
1991

Democracy Against Capitalism
Renewing Historical Materialism
1995

The Ellen Meiksins Wood Reader
2012

Empire of Capital
2003

Peasant-Citizen and Slave
The Foundations of Athenian Democracy
1988

Citizens to Lords
A Social History of Western Political Thought from Antiquity to the Late Middle Ages
2008

A Trumpet of Sedition
Political Theory and the Rise of Capitalism, 1509-1688
1997

The Retreat from Class
A New 'True' Socialism
1986

Liberty and Property
A Social History of Western Political Thought from the Renaissance to Enlightenment
2012