Julia Adams
Julia Adams teaches and conducts research in the areas of state formation; social theory and knowledge; family, sex and gender; early modern European politics, and colonialism and empire. Her current research focuses on (a) patrimonial politics in world history; (b) the sociology of agency relations and modernity, and (c) the representation of academic knowledge on Wikipedia and other digital platforms.
Adams is Margaret H. Marshall Professor of Sociology. She also co-directs YaleCHESS (Center for Historical Enquiry and the Social Sciences) and serves as a trustee of her alma mater, Reed College.
Adams received a National Science Foundation grant for collaborative research with Hannah Bruckner (Professor Emerita, NYU-Abu Dhabi) on “Wikipedia and the Democratization of Academic Knowledge”. The investigators continue to analyze the character of digital knowledge and the representation of scholars and scholarship.
Adams’ book The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (Cornell University Press, 2005) won the Gaddis Smith Book Prize. Click here to see a related interview. With Mounira Maya Charrad, she co-edited a 2015 Political Power and Social Theory volume titled Patrimonial Capitalism and Empire and a 2011 Annals of the Academy of Political and Social Sciences volume titled Patrimonial Power in the Modern World. With Elisabeth S. Clemens and Ann Shola Orloff, Adams edited Remaking Modernity: Politics, History, and Sociology (Duke University Press, 2005). Her work in this vein has twice won the Barrington Moore Jr. Award for Best Article given by the ASA section in Comparative and Historical Sociology.
At Yale she has chaired the Department of Sociology and the Council of Heads of College; directed the Division of the Social Sciences; the Fox International Fellowship Program, and the International Affairs Council and European Studies Councils at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. She served in the Provost’s Office in 2013-14. In 2014-24, Adams was the last Master of Yale’s Calhoun College and the first Head of Grace Hopper College. Beginning in academic year 2025-6, she will chair the European Studies Council at the MacMillan Center.