State University of Rio de Janeiro

Faculty Member, IESP/UERJ

Professor of Sociology

About

Since 2007 I am a research professor in sociology at the Institute of Social and Political Studies (IESP, formerly known as IUPERJ), which is part of the State University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Hailing originally from Flanders in Belgium, I have worked at many universities in Europe (University of Manchester, University of Humanist Studies in Utrecht, Brunel University in London, European University Institute in Florence), the United States (UCLA and Yale University) and Brazil (Federal University of Brasilia and Federal University of Pernambuco in Recife). Having lived in suitcases for almost twenty years, I have now finally settled in Brazil. I defended my PhD at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris in 1995 on theories of reification in German sociology, from Hegel to Habermas. Published in two volumes in French in the MAUSS series (a reference to Marcel Mauss that is also an acronym of the anti-disciplinary Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste dans les Sciences Sociales/Anti-Utilitarian Movement in the Social Sciences), this reconstruction of critical theory is now available in an abbreviated version in the Critical Realism Series. Working at the intersection of philosophy and sociology, my main research interests are related to German social philosophy, Anglo-Saxon social theory and French sociological theory. I have published a book on the sociology of Georg Simmel, a book on posthumanism and biocapitalism and, more recently, I have also gathered some of my main articles on critical realism and French sociology in Teoria social realista. Um dialogo franco-britanico. I am currently writing    a book (in French) on the new trends in world sociology and gathering materials for a book (in Portuguese) on the sociology of the soul.

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