Dmitry Kurakin

Dmitry Kurakin is currently a Visiting Professor in the Department of Sociology at Yale.  He is a Professor and a Lead Research Fellow at the National Research University “Higher School of Economics” (currently on extended leave). He founded and directed the Moscow Centre for Cultural Sociology. He is a social theorist and a cultural sociologist. His primary interests include theories of the sacred, the Durkheimian tradition, the emotional dimension of culture, culture and cognition, and temporality. Devoted to theory-driven research, he contributes to these areas through extensive empirical studies in a broad range of fields, such as: the sociology of inequality, education, and choice; the sociology of perception, with special regard to the mechanisms of emotional attraction/repulsion within the genre of mystery; the sociology of the body and its alterations, and other issues. He has published in such journals as European Sociological Review, Sociology of Education, American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Cultural Sociology, Journal of Classical Sociology, and others, as well as Russian academic journals. He edited and wrote the introduction to the Russian translation of Émile Durkheim’s “The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.” Currently, he is developing a cultural sociological theory of the emotional dimension of culture, one that advances cultural sociology while also connecting it to new developments in the sociology of culture and cognition.