Andreas Glaeser, Guest Speaker

Andreas Glaeser is a professor of sociology and department chair at the University of Chicago. A sociologist of culture, Dr. Glaeser has a particular interest in the construction of identities and knowledges. His work interlaces substantive interests with efforts to build social theory.  

His first book, Divided in Unity: Identity, Germany and the Berlin Police (Chicago: 2000), develops a theory of identity formation processes while exploring the reasons why east and west Germans find it so hard to understand each other after political unification.

His second book, Political Epistemics: The Secret Police, the Opposition and the End of East German Socialism (Chicago: 2010) focuses on the socialist German state’s effort to understand its citizens and to control the opposition. He develops a sociology of understanding that shows how knowledge can appear validated while at the same time being completely misleading.

Dr. Glaeser’s latest project studies the emergence of dominant understandings about Muslim immigrants in the interaction between contingent historical events, the cycles of electoral politics, everyday experiences and mass-mediated discourses in Germany, France and Britain.