Jason Mast’s research investigates how populism, ethno-nationalism, and isolationism have rippled through recent elections in Western democracies, and unsettled the multicultural, globalist, and neoliberal trajectories many had assumed were durable and determined. His writings on the American case can be found in the edited volumes Populism in the Civil Sphere (2021, Polity) and Politics of Meaning /Meaning of Politics: Cultural Sociology of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election (2019, Palgrave Macmillan). Coauthored with Daniel Šuber, his research on the German case, “Societalized Politics in the German Civil Sphere: The 2015 “Refugee Crisis” and Post-Potsdam Civil Backlash,” was recently (2024) published in the International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society. Mast also examines how recent developments in cognitive psychology, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience have challenged how the social sciences and humanities theorize the intersections between mind, culture, and society, such as in his article, “Representationalism and Cultural Cognitivism” (2020, American Journal of Cultural Sociology).
Mast earned his PhD in sociology from UCLA. He has been a Research Mitarbeiter at Zeppelin University, in Germany, a Global Research Fellow at the University of Warwick, in England, a research fellow at the Normative Orders Excellence Cluster at Goethe-University Frankfurt, in Germany, and until recently, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow affiliated with the University of Trento and Yale University.