Julian Go is Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago where he is also a Faculty Affiliate in the Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture and The Committee on International Relation. He is also a Fellow of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory and former President of the Social Science History Association. 

Julian Go’s research explores the social logics, forms and impact of empires and colonialism; postcolonial/decolonial thought and related questions of social theory, epistemology, and knowledge; and global historical sociology. 

Much of Go’s work has focused on the US empire, resulting in, among other work, his trilogy on empire: American Empire and the Politics of Meaning (Duke University Press, 2008), Patterns of Empire: the British and American Empires, 1688 to Present (Cambridge, 2011) and Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the United States (Cambridge, 2024).

His other work is on postcolonial thought and social theory, represented by various articles in his books Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory (Oxford, 2016) and Anticolonialism and Social Thought (co-edited with Anaheed Al-Hardan) and global historical sociology and transnational field theory: Fielding Transnationalism (co-edited with Monika Krause, Wiley & Sons, 2016) and Global Historical Sociology, co-edited with George Lawson (Cambridge, 2016).

Julian’s research also includes the historical sociology of policing, resulting in his prize-winning book, Policing Empires, his award-winning article, “The Imperial Origins of American Policing: Militarization and Imperial Feedback in the Early 20th Century”, several book chapters, and a forthcoming volume co-edited with Stuart Schrader titled The Imperial Entanglements of Policing. Julian has also appeared on the Netflix documentary about policing, Power, directed by Academy Award nominee Yance Ford.

His scholarship has won prizes from the American Sociological Association, the Eastern Sociological Society, the American Political Science Association, and the International Studies Association, among other institutions. He is the winner of Lewis A. Coser Award for Theoretical Agenda Setting in Sociology given by the American Sociological Association. In 2021-2022, Julian will serve as the President of the Social Science History Association.

For more information, including a list of his publications and links, see his website.