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Derek Sayer
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Derek Sayer

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I am a British/Canadian writer and retired professor, whose work spans social theory, historical sociology, and cultural history. Educated in the UK at the Universities of Essex and Durham, I taught at the Universities of Glasgow (1978-86), Alberta (1986-2005), and Lancaster (2006-16). I chaired the University of Alberta Sociology Department from 1996-2000, held a Canada Research Chair from 2000-2005, and served as head of the History Department at Lancaster from 2009-12. I co-founded the Journal of Historical Sociology in 1988 and have been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada since 1994. I began my professional career writing on social theory (Marx’s Method, 1978; Society, with David Frisby, 1986; The Violence of Abstraction, 1987; Readings from Karl Marx, 1989; Capitalism and Modernity, 1990) and historical sociology (The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution, with Philip Corrigan, 1985). Since the 1990s the core of my work has been an award-winning trilogy of books that take the city of Prague (where I lived from 1991-1993) as an alternative vantage point from which to rethink "modernity." These are: The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History (1998); Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History (2013); and Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History (2022). All are published by Princeton University Press. My other books include Going Down for Air: A Memoir in Search of a Subject (2004); Rank Hypocrisies: The Insult of the REF (2015, a critique of the UK's Research Excellence Framework); Making Trouble: Surrealism and the Human Sciences (2017); and a history-cum-travel guide, Prague: Crossroads of Europe (2018). I have also coedited books with Dariusz Gafijczuk (The Inhabited Ruins of Central Europe, 2013) and Yoke-Sum Wong (Twenty Years of The Journal of Historical Sociology, two vols, 2008). My writings have been translated into Japanese, Chinese, Korean, French, Spanish, Polish, Turkish, and Czech. I retired from Lancaster and returned to Canada shortly afterwards in June 2016. Retirement has given me not only time to write, but freedom to do so in a way that is not driven by the targets of “impact” and income generation that currently deform British universities. I do have a life besides. Before COVID-19 it included a lot of travel, especially long American road trips in rented SUVs; wine and food (growing, cooking, and eating it); art and photography; a lifelong love affair with music, ranging from dead operatic sopranos to the wilder shores of jazz; and family and friends on both sides of the Atlantic and much further south and east. I live in Calgary, Alberta, with my partner Yoke-Sum and our rumbunctious young standard poodle Alice.
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