Björn Wittrock
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Björn Wittrock was a Founding Director of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study and its Principal in the years 1996-2018. He was appointed University Professor at Uppsala University in 1999. Prior to that he held the Lars Hierta Chair of Government at Stockholm University.
He is one of the founders of SIAS, a group of ten leading institutes for advanced study and has served on boards and committees at more than twenty such institutes on four continents, on panels of national and international research councils, including the ERC and the committee for the Holberg Prize. Recently, he has been chairing juries for the Erasmus Medal, for the Barcelona Hypatia European Science Prize and for the social sciences and humanities of the Falling Walls Awards. He has been President of the International Institute of Sociology and is Chair of the Class of Social Sciences of Academia Europae and a Vice-President ex officio.
Björn Wittrock has written on the history and sociology of the social sciences, the history of universities but in recent years most extensively on social theory and world history. He was one of the scholars who re-examined the hypothesis of the Axial Age. He proposed the idea of so-called ecumenical renaissances across Afro-Eurasia in the first centuries of the second millennium CE as a non-Eurocentric alternative to standard accounts of this era. He was also one the scholars who articulated the idea of so-called multiple modernities.
He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Academia Europaea and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In April 2024, he joins the IAS for a one-month writing residency.
Research Interests
Social Theory and Word History
Nature of Key Transformative Processes in the Contemporary Era
This research project aims to grasp the nature of key transformative processes in the contemporary era. Already in the article “Modernity: One, None or Many in Daedalus (Winter 2000), he wrote what might perhaps be characterised as a synopsis of such an analysis. One part of Bjorn Wittrock's current work consists in confronting his own way of conceptualising this problematique with main currents of contemporary social theory. In particular, while his research stay, he will engage with recent and highly influential forms legal and of, what might be termed, neo-naturalistic forms of theorizing.
As for legal theory, he will focus on Martti Koskennieimi’s magnum opus, To the Uttermost Parts of the Earth: Legal Imagination and International Power 1300–1870 (Cambridge: CUP, 2021).
As for neo-naturalistic reasoning, he will highlight two powerful currents of contemporary theorizing, namely first that from within the cognitive sciences – working on Peter Gardenfors or Asifa Masjid' work, and secondly within the analysis of global human-originated change. In this second field, he shall focus on the oeuvre in the last decade and a half of Dipesh Chakrabarty on anthropocene time.
Key Publications
Social Science at the Crossroads (with Shalini Randeria. Brill 2019)
Eurasian Transformations, Tenth to Thirteenth Centuries (with Johann P. Arnason. Brill 2011)
Axial Civilizations and World History (with Johann P. Arnason and Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Brill, 2005)
Public Spheres and Collective Identities (with Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and Wolfgang Schluchter, Transaction 2001)
The Rise of the Social Sciences and the Formation of Modernity: Conceptual Change in Context, 1750-1850 (with Johan Heilbron and Lar Magnusson, Kluwer, 1998)
The European and American University since 1800 (with Sheldon Rothblatt, Cambridge UP, 1993)
Discourses on Society: The Shaping of the Social Science Disciplines (with Peter Wagner and Richard Whitley, Kluwer, 1991)
Social Sciences and Modern States: National Experiences and Theoretical Crossroads (with Peter Wagner, Carol Hirschon Weiss and Hellmut Wollmann, Cambridge UP, 1991).
 New session of the "Paris IAS Ideas" online talk series, with the participation of Björn Wittrock, University of Uppsala / 2023-2024 Paris IAS Fellow |
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