George Steinmetz is the Charles Tilly Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan. He has held tenured positions at the University of Chicago and the New School for Social Research in Sociology and was a Visiting Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. His most recent historical monograph is The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire (Princeton University Press, 2023), translated into German (Hamburger Edition, 2024), French (Raisons d’agir, 2027), and other languages. His other historical monographs are 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). He is the editor of several collections, including The Social Sciences in the Looking-Glass. Studies in the Production of Knowledge (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, 2018). He is the author of around 180 articles or chapters, including “Durkheim’s Critique of Colonialism and Empire,” Modern Intellectual History, 21, 4 (December 2024), pp. 874-896; and “W.E.B. Du Bois on Empires and Colonies, 1896-1963,” Journal of Classical Sociology, 26,1 (2026), pp. 3–33. He is currently completing a monograph on British social science and 20th century colonialism (Princeton University Press) and a shorter book, Rethinking Postcolonial Sociology (Edward Elgar).
