Javier Pérez-Jara is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and East Asian Studies at the University of Seville and a Faculty Fellow at Yale University’s Center for Cultural Sociology. He earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy with honors (cum laude) from the University of Seville in 2012, and conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Sociology from 2013 to 2015. He later joined the International Business School at Beijing Foreign Studies University as an Assistant Professor, where he taught philosophy, critical thinking, and sociology for eight years.
His research lies at the intersection of cultural sociology and philosophy, with a focus on the social construction of utopian and apocalyptic narratives, contemporary materialism, and the nature versus nurture debate. His work has been published in several peer-reviewed journals, and he is the author of Techno-Utopia and Techno-Apocalypse in Global Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2026), Science and Apocalypse in Bertrand Russell: A Cultural Sociology (co-authored with Lino Camprubí, Bloomsbury, 2022), and La Filosofía de Bertrand Russell (Pentalfa, 2014). He is also co-editor of Dramatic Intellectuals (Palgrave Macmillan Series in Cultural Sociology, 2025), Beyond Nature and Nurture: Perspectives on Human Multidimensionality (Springer’s Synthese Library, 2025), and Contemporary Materialism: Its Ontology and Epistemology (Springer’s Synthese Library, 2022).
Pérez-Jara has held visiting positions at academic institutions worldwide, including the universities of Stanford, Yale, Tokyo, Kyoto, Sangyo of Kyoto, Tohoku, Gothenburg, Aristotle of Thessaloniki, Fu Jen Catholic in Taiwan, and Minzu of China. He has also delivered invited lectures, workshops, and talks at leading academic centers such as the universities of Chicago, Notre Dame, Oxford, London, Singapore (NUS), Hong Kong, Osaka, Meiji, and Sophia, as well as at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and the Beijing Institute of Technology.