Julia Adams

Julia Adams teaches and conducts research in the areas of state formation; social theory and knowledge; family, sex and gender; early modern European politics; and colonialism and empire. Her current research focuses on patrimonial politics in world history; the sociology of agency relations and modernity; and the representation of academic knowledge on Wikipedia and other digital platforms.

Her book The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (Cornell University Press 2005) won the Gaddis Smith Book Prize.  (Click here to see a related interview.) With Mounira Maya Charrad, Adams co-edited Patrimonial Capitalism and Empire and Patrimonial Power in the Modern World. With E.S. Clemens and A.S. Orloff, Adams co-edited Remaking Modernity: Politics, History, and Sociology (Duke University Press 2005). Her work in this historical sociological vein has twice won the American Sociological Association’s Barrington Moore Jr. Award. This year, the 20^th anniversary of the publication of Remaking Modernity, has seen retrospectives in Beijing and Chicago, and culminates at the November 2025 meeting of the Social Science History Association.

At Yale, Adams chaired the Department of Sociology and the Council of Heads of College and directed the Division of the Social Sciences, the Fox International Fellowship Program, and the International Affairs Council and European Studies Councils at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. She served in the Provost’s Office during the 2013-14 school year. From 2014 to 2024, Adams was the last master of Yale’s Calhoun College and the first head of Grace Hopper College. She currently co-chairs the president’s Committee on Trust in Higher Education at Yale.