Jeffrey Alexander

Jeffrey Alexander is the Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology at Yale University, founder and co-director of Yale’s Center for Cultural Sociology, and co-editor of The American Journal of Cultural Sociology. A social theorist whose early work challenged the anti-cultural reductionism of classical and modern sociology, Alexander has worked with generations of students and colleagues to create a “strong program” in cultural sociology. Synthesizing late Durkheim with semiotics, poststructuralism, and cultural anthropology, he has conceptualized, not only models of deep cultural structure, but theories of cultural trauma, social performance, and material iconicity. Alexander has also developed “civil sphere theory,” a macro-sociological model of democracy and the forces that can undermine it. He is currently organizing a series of conference/edited book projects: The Civil Sphere in Latin America (Cambridge University Press 2018), The Civil Sphere in East Asia (CUP, 2019), Breaching the Civil Order: Radicalism and the Civil Sphere (CUP, 2019), The Nordic Civil Sphere (Polity, 2020), and Populism in the Civil Sphere (Polity 2021). The Civil Sphere in Canada will conference in 2021 and The Civil Sphere in India will conference in 2022. Both volumes will be published with Polity Press. His most recent book is What Makes a Social Crisis: The Societalization of Social Problems (Polity 2019). His most recent articles are “Performativity of Objects” Sociologisk Forskning, 57(3–4), 2020, and “”The Double Whammy Trauma: Narrative and Counter- Narrative during Covid-Floyd,” Thesis Eleven, online project: Living and Thinking Crisis. July 9, 2020