Julian Go

Julian Go is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. His research explores the social logics, forms and impact of empires and colonialism; postcolonial/decolonial thought and related questions of social theory, epistemology, and knowledge; and global historical sociology. Much of Go’s work has focused on the US empire, resulting in his sole-authored books: American Empire and the Politics of Meaning (Duke University Press, 2008), Patterns of Empire: the British and American Empires, 1688 to the Present  (Cambridge University Press, 2011), and Policing Empires: Militarization and Race in Britain and America, 1829-present (Oxford, 2023) which explores imperialism’s impact upon police militarization in the US and Britain.

He has also produced work on global historical sociology and transnational field theory, including Fielding Transnationalism (co-edited with Monika Krause, Wiley & Sons, 2016) and Global Historical Sociology, co-edited with George Lawson (Cambridge, 2016).  His other work is on postcolonial thought and social theory, such as in his book Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory (Oxford, 2016). He is currently working on a project that recovers anticolonial thought as a critical form of social theory. This project is seen in his 2022 annual lecture for the British Journal of Sociology, “Thinking Against Empire: Anticolonial Thought as Social Theory” and a forthcoming book volume (co-edited with Anaheed Al-Hardan), Anticolonialism and Social Thought.

Go’s scholarship has won prizes and recognition from the American Sociological Association, the Eastern Sociological Society, the American Political Science Association, the International Studies Association, and the Manila Critics Circle, among other organizations. He received the Lewis A. Coser Award for Theoretical Agenda-Setting from the American Sociological Association.

View Julian Go’s biography on the Sociology department’s website.