Dmitry Kurakin is Co-Director of the Modernity Seminar at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia and Professor at the National Research University “Higher School of Economics” in Moscow (on extended leave). He is the founder and former director of the Moscow Centre for Cultural Sociology and is internationally recognized as a social theorist and cultural sociologist. He served as Acting Associate Director at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University (Spring 2024–25) and as Visiting Professor in the Department of Sociology at Yale University (2023–25). His research focuses on the emotional dimension of culture, the Durkheimian tradition, the theory of the sacred, and the intersections of culture with cognition, narrative, and temporality. He has published widely in leading journals, including Theory and Society, European Sociological Review, American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Sociology of Education, Cultural Sociology, Sociological Forum, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, and Journal of Classical Sociology, among others. He also edited and wrote the introduction to the Russian translation of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. His current work develops a theory of mystery and enchantment in modernity, advances a cultural-sociological theory of cathexis, and rethinks narrative and temporality.
