George Steinmetz is the Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of sociology at the University of Michigan. He is the author of three archivally-based historical-sociological monographs: The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire (Princeton University Press, 2023); The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2007); and Regulating the Social: The Welfare State and Local Politics in Imperial Germany (Princeton University Press, 1993). The Social Sciences in the Looking-Glass. Studies in the Production of Knowledge, with Didier Fassin (Duke University Press, 2023); The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and its Epistemological Others (Duke University Press, 2005) and State/Culture: State Formation after the Cultural Turn (Cornell University Press, 1999). He co-directed the film “Detroit; Ruin of a City” (2006). He is the winner of Distinguished Career Awards from the Comparative and Historical Sociology (2025) and History of Sociology and Social Thought (2024) Sections and the Lewis A. Coser Award for Theoretical Agenda Setting (2006) in the American Sociological Association; the Siegfried Landshut Prize (2020) from the Hamburg Institute for Social Research; the National Endowment for the Humanities (2012, 1991), the Norbert Elias Foundation (2011), and the John Simon Guggenheim foundation (1996).
After working on the historical sociology of states, colonies, empires, and sociology, George Steinmetz began investigating the intersections between colonialism and the social science, starting with a series of articles in sociology, history, and humanities journals and an edited volume (Sociology and Empire. The Imperial Entanglements of a Discipline, Duke University Press, 2013) , and culminating in a series of monographs on imperial research in the French, Belgian, British, and Nazi German sociological fields, before turning to synthetic volume surveying the entanglements of all of the European and North American sociologies with colonialism.