George Steinmetz is the Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan and a Corresponding Member of the Centre de Sociologie européenne, Paris. He is a social theorist and a historical sociologist of states, empires, and social science.
Dr. Steinmetz is currently working on two main projects. The first is a project on the emergence of sociology in the former British and French overseas colonies between the 1930s and the 1960s. The second is a reconstruction of sociology as historical socioanalysis. He has also worked on Germany and several of its former colonies (Namibia, Samoa, and Qingdao, China), on social policy at the local and central levels in imperial Germany, on visual sociology, on the rise and fall of the city of Detroit, on the epistemology of the human sciences, and on political and cultural theory.