[16] In 2019, Brown delivered The Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Yale University, titled "Politics and Knowledge in Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber.

Brown served as Council Member of the American Political Science Association (2007–09) and as Chair of the UC Humanities Research Institute Board of Governors (2009–11).

"[24][25] Brown's thinking on the decline of sovereignty and the hollowing out of democracy has found popular and journalistic audiences, with discussions of her work appearing in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian.

[34] She has produced a body of work drawing from Karl Marx's critique of capitalism and its relation to religion and secularism,[35][36] Friedrich Nietzsche's usefulness for thinking about power and the ruses of morality, Max Weber on the modern organization of power, psychoanalysis and its implications for political identification,[37] Michel Foucault's work on governmentality and neoliberalism, as well as other contemporary continental philosophers.

From outlawing hate speech to banning pornography, Brown argues, well-intentioned attempts at protection can legitimize the state while harming subjects by codifying their identities as helpless or in need of continuous governmental regulation.

Through the concept of "wounded attachments", Brown contends that psychic injury may accompany and sustain racial, ethnic, and gender categories, particularly in relation to state law and discursive formations.

In this and other works Brown has criticized representatives of second wave feminism, such as Catharine MacKinnon, for re-inscribing the category of "woman" as an essentialized identity premised on injury.

Drawing on a range of thinkers, such as Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, Spinoza, Benjamin and Derrida, Brown rethinks the disorientation and possibility inherent to contemporary democracy.

This work consists of seven articles responding to particular occasions, each of which "mimic, in certain ways, the experience of the political realm: one is challenged to think here, now, about a problem that is set and framed by someone else, and to do so before a particular audience or in dialogue with others not of one's own choosing."

According to Brown, the essays do not aim to definitively answer the given questions but "to critically interrogate the framing and naming practices, challenge the dogmas (including those of the Left and of feminism), and discern the constitutive powers shaping the problem at hand.

Brown's study begins by engaging and revising key arguments in Foucault's The Birth of Biopolitics with the aim of analyzing different ways that democracy is being hollowed out by neoliberal rationality.

While this turn is animated by socioeconomically aggrieved white working- and middle-class populations, Brown argues that it is also contoured by the multipronged assault on democratic values taking place under neoliberalism.

Brown also explores the unintentional outcomes of neoliberal reason, from its attack on the value of society and its fetish of individual freedom to its legitimation of inequality, to understand how it generates an apocalyptic populism willing to destroy the world rather than endure a future in which white male supremacy disappears.

[54] Brown's latest book, published in 2023 by Harvard University Press, addresses the pervasive nihilism corroding contemporary political and academic spheres.

Brown explores Weber's insights on countering nihilism, advocating for a reexamination of truth and a reinvigoration of integrity in both scholarly and political realms.

While acknowledging Weber's distinctions between academia and politics, Brown proposes reparative strategies for our times, urging the left to uphold critical thinking and embrace radical democratic ideals while navigating the challenges posed by nihilism.

For all its resources, innovation and wealth, California has sunk to nearly the bottom of the nation in per student spending, and our public higher education system, once the envy of the world, is in real peril.