Professor and Chair of the Sociology Department
Office: Social Sciences 401 D-E
Phone: 773-702-8679
B.A. Eberhard-Karls University, Tübingen, Germany, 1985
M.A. Eberhard-Karls University, Tübingen, Germany, 1989
M.P.A Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 1992
Ph.D. Harvard University, 1997
Andreas Glaeser is a sociologist of culture with a particular interest in the construction of identities and knowledges. His work interlaces substantive interests with efforts to build social theory. In this vein, his first book develops a theory of identity formation processes in the context of an ethnographic study of Germany's post-unification woes. He is currently finishing a book aiming at the development of a political epistemology which asks how people come to understand the world of politics from within their particular biographical trajectories and social milieus. The substantive focus of this book is the late socialist German state's effort to understand its citizens and to control the opposition as well as the opposition members' efforts to form their independent understanding of state socialism. He has begun work on a new project which 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.
Journals
Glaeser is the co-editor of Chicago Studies in the Practices of Meaning.
Centers
Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT) and the Center for the Study of Communication and Society.
Selected Publications
"An Ontology for the Ethnographic Analysis of Social Processes: Extending the Extended Case Method," in Social Analysis, accepted for publication (in the editorial process)
"Collective Intentionality, Belonging and the Production of State Paranoia: Stasi in the Late GDR," in Off Stage/On Display: Intimacies and Ethnographies in the Age of Public Culture. Stanford University Press, 2004 (in press)
"Power/Knowledge Failure: Epistemic Practices and Ideologies in the Secret Police of Former East Germany," in Social Analysis, vol. 47 (1), 2003
"Why Germany Remains Divided," in The New Germany in a New Europe, Routledge, 2000
Divided in Unity: Identity, Germany and the Berlin Police. The University of Chicago Press, 1999.
"Placed Selves: The Role of Space in Identity Formation Processes of Eastern and Western Berlin Police Officers after German Unification," in Social Identities, Vol. 4, No. 1, 1998.
