About

Julian Go is Professor of Sociology and the College at the University of Chicago, where he is also a Faculty Affiliate in the Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture and in The Committee on International Relations. He is a Fellow of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory and will be the Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Cambridge University, UK, in Spring 2026. Julian completed his postdoctoral work as an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy of International and Area Studies. He has taught at Boston University and the University of Illinois, and has held visiting professor and scholar positions at prestigious institutions including Harvard University, Cambridge University, the London School of Economics, Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Université Paris-Dauphine, the University of Lucerne in Switzerland, the Havens Center at the University of Wisconsin, and the Third World Studies Center at the University of the Philippines. His research and writing have been translated into multiple languages such as French, German, Japanese, Mandarin, Portuguese, and Russian. His publications have received prizes and recognition from notable organizations including the American Sociological Association, the Eastern Sociological Society, the American Political Science Association, the International Studies Association, and the Manila Critics Circle. In 2018, he was awarded the Lewis A. Coser Award for Theoretical Agenda Setting in Sociology by the American Sociological Association. Julian's work has been featured or discussed in various popular press outlets including The New Yorker, The Huffington Post, Foreign Affairs, Le Monde, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, La Presse, the Guardian, and various podcasts. He has also appeared in documentary films, most recently in the Netflix documentary about policing titled Power, directed by Academy Award nominee Yance Ford. Julian holds significant editorial roles, including editing Political Power and Social Theory, serving as former Book Review Editor of the American Journal of Sociology, and participating on the editorial boards of several journals such as the American Journal of Sociology, the British Journal of Sociology, Sociological Theory, Comparative Studies in Society and History, the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Social Science History, and the Sociology of Race & Ethnicity. He also serves on editorial boards of several university press series. Professionally, he has acted as President of the Social Science History Association and is a member of The Immanuel Wallerstein Chair of the Center for Advanced Studies of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the National University of Córdoba, Argentina, and the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt am Main. Additionally, he has served as Chair of the Global & Transnational Sociology Section and the Comparative Historical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Social Science
• Philosophy
• Law
• Epistemology
• Gender studies
• Anthropology

Selected publications

• Theorist Ignored: Hubert Harrison and the Birth of Racial Capitalism Theory

  Sociological Theory · 2026-04-22

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Hubert Henry Harrison (1883–1927) was an early twentieth-century writer who engaged Marxist theoreticians and conventional American sociological theory in his writings, but he remains unknown to social theorists and histories of American social science. This article shows that Harrison was a social theorist offering valuable insights into the relationship between racial inequality and capitalism. Across his writings, Harrison developed a nascent theory of racial capitalism that anticipated contemporary debates while offering distinct contributions. He conceptualized capitalist production as racially bifurcated and asserted the relative autonomy of race; he offered a structuration theory of racism and capitalist reproduction, showing how racial capitalism is a system co-constituted by racism and economic imperatives; he theorized the role of imperialism and its different forms, explaining how racism globalizes; and he explained agency and resistance as necessary outcomes of the logic of global racial capitalism.

  PublisherDOI

• Policing Psychoactives

  The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs · 2026-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• Introduction

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-09-16 · 1 citations

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• The Promise of Anticolonial Social Theory

  Bristol University Press eBooks · 2025-11-26

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Vision and method in global historical sociology

  Social Science History · 2025-01-01 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access1st author

  Abstract Recent years have seen the development of a range of approaches concerned with theorizing and empirically demonstrating the significance of “transboundary entanglements” – patterns of connections between and across social sites. This work, spanning disciplines from sociology to international relations, and including subfields from postcolonial scholarship to global history, seeks to transcend the methodological nationalism associated with much preexisting historical social science by examining how, and with what effect, transboundary entanglements are formed and transformed over time. To date, however, the rich theoretical and substantive contributions made by these approaches have not been matched by comparable attention to the methodological principles and transposable procedures that can be used to analyze transboundary entanglements. This article contributes to this task. We make the case for a principle we call “global methodological relationalism” and explore how this principle can be operationalized through a three-step procedure: first, track relations across a boundary; second, follow these relations over time and across cases to establish variation; and third, provide an explanation of this variation. We highlight sites of overlap and contrast with existing methods for case selection, tracing historical processes, and making causal claims in small-N research, and establish the ways in which a “global historical sociology” oriented around “global methodological relationalism” can assess the significance of “transboundary entanglements.”

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• What Is Relationalism?

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2025-05-22 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Relationalism holds that relations are the basic building blocks of social and political life. There are many different kinds of relationalists, but they all emphasize the causal and constitutive role played by, variously, the web of interactions, transactions, meanings, and exchanges that connect actors and other social sites. Relationalists contend that interactions forge identities, generate interests, and allocate power. This chapter provides an overview of relationalism and juxtaposes relationalism with two forms of substantialism—individualism and holism. It situates relationalism in its sociological foundations and provides a brief overview of four types of relationalist approaches prevalent in International Relations theorizing: sociological network theory, field theory, assemblage theory, and repertoire analysis.

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• THINKING AGAINST EMPIRE: ANTICOLONIAL THOUGHT AS SOCIAL THEORY

  Bulletin of Bashkir State Pedagogical University named after M Akmulla Series Social and Humanitarian Sciences · 2024-09-09

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Sociology was born in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a project in, of, and for empire. This essay excavates a tradition of social thought that grew alongside metropolitan sociology but has been marginalized by it: anticolonial thought. Emerging from anticolonial movements, writers and thinkers, anticolonial thought in 19th and 20th centuries emerged from a variety of thinkers (from indigenous activists in the Americas to educated elites in the American, Francophone and British colonies). I argue that this body of thought offers distinct visions of society, social relations, and social structure, along with generative analytic approaches to the social self, social solidarity and global relations—among other themes. Anticolonial thought offers the basis for an alternative canon and corpus of sociological thinking to which we might turn as we seek to revitalize and decolonize sociology.

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• Thinking against empire: anticolonial thought as social theory

  Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya · 2024-06-13 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Sociology was born in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a project in, of, and for empire. This essay excavates a tradition of social thought that grew alongside metropolitan sociology but has been marginalized by it: anticolonial thought. Emerging from anticolonial movements, writers and thinkers, anticolonial thought in 19th and 20th centuries emerged from a variety of thinkers (from indigenous activists in the Americas to educated elites in the American, Francophone and British colonies). I argue that this body of thought offers distinct visions of society, social relations, and social structure, along with generative analytic approaches to the social self, social solidarity and global relations – among other themes. Anticolonial thought offers the basis for an alternative canon and corpus of sociological thinking to which we might turn as we seek to revitalize and decolonize sociology.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Perspectives sur les champs extra-nationaux

  Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales · 2024-09-24 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  L’auteur, sociologue ayant contribué à l’émergence de l’étude des champs transnationaux ou globaux aux États-Unis, se livre ici, à l’occasion de ce numéro d’ Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales , à un exercice de réflexion et de synthèse. Il commence par esquisser brièvement les dynamiques d’importation du concept de champ par les sociologues étatsuniens pour analyser les relations extra-nationales et évoque sa propre entrée dans l’analyse « post-nationale » des champs. Il montre ensuite comment les articles de ce numéro contribuent à la sociologie bourdieusienne des champs. La conclusion de l’article répond à l’une des principales questions soulevées dans l’introduction du numéro : quelles innovations théoriques, pistes empiriques ou réorientations les études de champs transnationaux ou mondiaux offrent-elles à la sociologie des champs, qu’ils soient extra-nationaux, infra-nationaux ou nationaux ?

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• Gramsci in South Africa: On Postcolonial Sociology and Levenson’s <i>Delivery as Dispossession</i> Delivery as Dispossession: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Postapartheid City. By LevensonZachary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. 296 pp. $29.99 (paper). ISBN: 9780197629253.

  Critical Sociology · 2024-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
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Frequent coauthors

• George Lawson

  7 shared

• Andrew Zimmerman

  3 shared

• Emily Erikson

  3 shared

• Tarak Barkawi

  School of International Relations

  3 shared

• Vrushali Patil

  3 shared

• Matthew Norton

  Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center New Orleans

  3 shared

• Robbie Shilliam

  Johns Hopkins University

  3 shared

• Anne L. Foster

  Indiana State University

  3 shared

Awards & honors

• Lewis A. Coser Award for Theoretical Agenda Setting in Socio…