Matthias Leanza has been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Sciences since 2025. Funded by a Starting Grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), his professorship bridges the fields of historical sociology and the history of sociology. It focuses on how the social sciences engaged with and actively shaped the decolonization that followed World War II. Of particular interest are concepts of social and political modernization that were instrumental in envisioning a postimperial world and contributed to establishing the sovereign nation-state as a global norm. The professorship team is currently being formed.

After completing his undergraduate degree in sociology at Bielefeld University, Matthias Leanza earned his Ph.D. at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg with a dissertation on the preventive construction of the future. This work was awarded the 2017 Erasmus Prize for the Liberal Arts and Sciences by University College Freiburg. His habilitation thesis (second book), completed at the University of Basel, examines the structural effects of colonial rule through the lens of the German colonial empire. Specifically, the study traces how the overseas territories contributed to consolidating the German nation-state before World War I and identifies the causal mechanisms underlying this process. His broader research emphasizes the critical importance of empires and colonialism for advancing social theory.

As a founding and board member of the Working Group on Historical Sociology, Matthias Leanza is actively involved in the Section for Cultural Sociology of the German Sociological Association, where he organizes regular conferences. Fellowships and research stays have taken him to leading academic institutions, including the University of Michigan, the University of Virginia, the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL) in Berlin, and the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) at Bielefeld University. Most recently, he was a Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Research Center global dis:connect at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich during the 2023–24 academic year.

You can access his CV, which includes a complete list of publications, [here].

• Historical sociology
• Social theory
• History of sociology
• Empire and colonial studies