George Steinmetz

Class of Spring 2020

Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor, Department of Sociology

University of Michigan

Imperial Sociology: Sociologists in the British, French, and Nazi Empires, 1930s-1960s

Steinmetz’s Academy project looks at European sociology’s engagement with colonial and Continental empires from 1930 to 1960. While researching the French, British, and Belgian cases, he discovered that around half of the discipline was working in or on the colonies between 1945 and 1960, and that many of their ideas were picked up by later sociology without attribution. The first generation of sociologists born as British and French colonial subjects trained during these years; their ideas about cultural hybridity and epistemic standpoints became part of postcolonial theory. In Berlin, Steinmetz will examine German sociologists’ contributions to Nazi imperialism in occupied Eastern Europe and to Nazi plans for a never-realized African empire. He will look at sources from the Reichsuniversitäten in Poznań and Prague, Königsberg Universität, the Kolonialpolitisches Amt, and other institutes, as well as at the work of imperial sociologists such as Thurnwald, Mühlmann, Hippius, and Müller. Steinmetz aims to reconstruct their studies of the uprooting and resettlement of populations, German settlement, and the “Germanization” of groups with putative German ancestry.

George Steinmetz is the Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan and a Corresponding Member of the Centre de Sociologie Européenne, in Paris. He studied at Reed College as well as in Paris and Berlin; he completed his PhD in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Steinmetz has been a tenured professor at the University of Chicago and The New School for Social Research and was a visiting professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study. His books include Regulating the Social: The Welfare State and Local Politics in Imperial Germany (Princeton, 1993) and The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (Chicago, 2007), which received the Barrington Moore, Jr. Award, among others. His forthcoming book is tentatively titled “Overseas: The Imperial Origins of Postwar European Sociology.” Steinmetz is also the editor of State/Culture (Cornell, 1999), The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences (Duke, 2005), and Sociology and Empire (Duke, 2013), and has published in the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and Sociological Theory. He directed the documentary film Detroit: Ruin of a City (2012) with Michael Chanan, and his work has been supported by the NEH, Guggenheim Foundation, and German Academic Exchange Service.