Bruce Curtis

Biography

Much of my work concerns the historical sociology of state formation. My doctoral work criticized Marxist reproduction analyses of the development of public education through comparative historical investigation. Involvement in the debate around domestic labour under capitalism, led me to think about the historical sociology of household formation and the relations between the domestic domain and the political. Historians criticized my early historical sociology as based on secondary sources (their own work!), which led me to the archive, and which gave me an enduring case of what Arlette Farge called ‘le gout de l’archive.’ My understanding of state paper collections was shaped by engagement with the ‘Foucault wave,’ with the work of Norbert Elias, and by Corrigan and Sayer’s analysis of state formation as cultural revolution. Together with the sociology of Marx, Simmel and Bourdieu, this mix encouraged attention to the emergence, stabilization, and dominance or disappearance of social forms, figurations, and practices. My most marked post-2000 ‘reading experiences’ have been with Kant, Gadamer, the proto-sociology of the Enlightenment, French political theory, and the historical sociology of Arpad Szakolczai. I have always been fascinated by the counter-intuitive, by what ‘doesn’t fit,’ by problematic instances of what Pierre Bourdieu called ‘category slippage’ (which he saw as the ‘sociologist’s bread and butter’) and by the development of systems of classification and categorization. This has led to work, influenced by social studies of science and actor-network theory, on the history of weights and measures; the making of the census and of census categories; the politics of demography; and cases of boundary crossing, from so-called blues singers changing their names to record gospel music, to the configuration of modern consumers by new information technologies, and the age-governance of sexuality. The same interest is present in work I have done in the historical sociology of the governmental instrument of ‘inspection,’ on sanitary medicine, the nineteenth century cholera, and attempts to construct systems of civil registration and vital statistics. I also do work on power and sexuality, historically in terms of the government of sex at school, in the current period in relation to the ‘fellatio epidemic’ in middle school. I am interested in promoting a ‘reflexive’ sociology that interrogates the analytic categories it employs.

Research Interest

State formation, administration and government; subjectivities; development of the ‘social and moral sciences’; the British Empire, 1750-1850.