Dmitry Kurakin is a Visiting Professor in the Department of Sociology. He is also a Professor and Lead Research Fellow at the National Research University “Higher School of Economics” (currently on extended leave). He founded and directed the Moscow Centre for Cultural Sociology and is recognized as a social theorist and cultural sociologist. His primary interests encompass the emotional dimension of culture, the Durkheimian tradition, the theory of the sacred, as well as culture and cognition, narrative, and temporality. Committed to theory-driven research, he contributes to these areas through extensive empirical studies across a broad range of fields, including literature, narrative, fiction, body and health, education and choice, inequality, perception, technology, and more. He has published extensively in journals such as European Sociological Review, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, Sociology of Education, American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Cultural Sociology, Journal of Classical Sociology, among others, as well as in various Russian academic journals. He also edited and wrote the introduction for the Russian translation of Émile Durkheim’s “The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.” Currently, he is developing a cultural-sociological theory of cathexis, a theory of mystery and enchantment in modernity, and is theorizing on narrative and temporality.
