Matthias Leanza is SNSF Starting Grant Professor of Sociology at the University of Basel. His current research examines how the social sciences engaged with decolonization after the Second World War and, in doing so, helped shape that process. The project focuses on concepts of social and political modernization that structured the imagination of a post-imperial world and contributed to establishing the sovereign nation-state as a global norm. At the same time, the experience of decolonization profoundly reshaped the conceptual and methodological repertoire of the social sciences, leaving behind an intellectual legacy that remains only partially understood. The project is based on extensive archival research in the United States and develops a sociology of situated fields of knowledge production.

His research is guided by the central premise that the core institutions of modern societies—such as the nation-state—can only be adequately understood in light of their global conditions of emergence. From this perspective, globalization appears less as a consequence of modernity than as the context in which its institutions took shape. His second monograph, based on his habilitation at the University of Basel, develops this argument through a case study of the German nation-state. Drawing on archival research in Europe and Africa, the book shows how overseas expansion contributed to the consolidation of the domestic nation-state and identifies the mechanisms through which this process unfolded. It is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in 2026.

Leanza studied sociology at Bielefeld University and received his PhD from the University of Freiburg in 2016. His dissertation, which examines how the future is constructed as an object of prevention, was awarded the Erasmus Prize for the Liberal Arts and Sciences by the University College Freiburg. In addition to his research, he is actively involved in strengthening historical sociology in the German-speaking academic community. He is a member of the Working Group on Historical Sociology within the German Sociological Association and is currently preparing an introduction to the field. He also serves on the editorial board of the Swiss Journal of Sociology.

His fellowships and visiting appointments have taken him to leading research 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 Kolleg “global dis:connect” at LMU Munich during the 2023–24 academic year.

A CV, including a list of selected publications, is available [here].

• Historical sociology
• Social theory
• History of sociology
• Empire and colonialism