Julia Adams

Julia Adams is on sabbatical for the 2024-25 academic year.

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 (a) patrimonial politics in world history; (b) the sociology of agency relations and modernity, and (c) the representation of academic knowledge on Wikipedia and other digital platforms.

Adams is Margaret H. Marshall Professor of Sociology. She also co-directs YaleCHESS (Center for Historical Enquiry and the Social Sciences) and serves as a trustee of her alma mater, Reed College.

Adams received a National Science Foundation grant for collaborative research with Hannah Bruckner (Professor Emerita, NYU-Abu Dhabi) on  “Wikipedia and the Democratization of Academic Knowledge”.  The investigators continue to analyze the character of digital knowledge and the representation of scholars and scholarship.  

Adams’ 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, she co-edited a 2015 Political Power and Social Theory volume titled Patrimonial Capitalism and Empire and a 2011 Annals of the Academy of Political and Social Sciences volume titled Patrimonial Power in the Modern World. With Elisabeth S. Clemens and Ann Shola Orloff, Adams edited Remaking Modernity: Politics, History, and Sociology (Duke University Press, 2005). Her work in this vein has twice won the Barrington Moore Jr. Award for Best Article given by the ASA section in Comparative and Historical Sociology.

At Yale she has chaired the Department of Sociology and the Council of Heads of College; 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 in 2013-14.  In 2014-24, Adams was the last Master of Yale’s Calhoun College and the first Head of Grace Hopper College.  

Adams/Brückner Wikipedia Research Project

• “Wikipedia and the Democratization of Academic Knowledge” began as an NSF-funded study of how academics and academic topics are represented on Wikipedia. The ongoing work continues to be directed by Professors Julia Adams and Hannah Brückner.  Read the statement.
• Adams, Julia (2016) Can crowdsourcing capture academic knowledge? The Wikipedia experiment, Parameters/SSRC, October 2016.

Social Science History Association Presidential Address

• Adams’ presidential address, “1-800-How-Am-I-Driving? Agency in Social Science History” can be found in Vol. 35 #1 (Spring 2011) of of Social Science History, pp. 1-17.

Recent Publications

Books and Volumes

• Adams, Julia and Charrad, M. Mounira (2015). Patrimonial Capitalism and Empire. (Book Series: Political Power and Social Theory). Emerald Publishing.
• Adams, Julia and Mounira Maya Charrad (2011). Patrimonial Power in the Modern World. (The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Direct Link.
• Adams, Julia (2005). The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
• Adams, Julia, Clemens, S. Elisabeth, Orloff, Ann (2005). Remaking Modernity: Politics, History, and Sociology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Selected Articles

• Isaac Ariail Reed and Julia Adams. 2024 (digital). 2025 (print). “Patriarchal Patrimonialism: Authority, Gender, and Max Weber’s Political Sociology,” in Joshua Derman and Peter E. Gordon, eds. Max Weber at 100.  Legacies and Prospects. (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press).
• Julia Adams 2020.“Patriarchy Resartus,” in Julia Adams, Benita Roth, and Pavla Miller, “Debating Patriarchy,” Lilith: A Feminist History Journal 26: 221-38.
• Julia Adams and Isaac Reed. 2020. “Coda: Crossing Companies, Theories of Agency, and Early Modern European Empire,” Journal of World History 31 #3 (September), 477-97.
• Adams, Julia:  Brueckner, Hannah and Naslund, Cambria (2019). “Who Counts as a Notable Sociologist on Wikipedia? Gender, Race, and the “Professor Test.” Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, Volume 5: pp. 1-14.
• Luo, Wei: Adams, Julia and Brueckner, Hannah (2018). “The Ladies Vanish? American Sociology and the Genealogy of its Missing Women on Wikipedia,” Comparative Sociology.  Vol. 17 #5, pp. 519-556. 
• Adams, Julia and Pincus, Steve (2017). “Imperial States in the Age of Discovery,” pp. 333-48 in The Many Hands of the State: Theorizing Political Authority and Social Control (eds. Kimberly J. Morgan and Ann Shola Orloff). New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Adams, Julia and Herzog, Ben (2017). “Women, Gender, and the Revocation of Citizenship in the United States,” Sage Journals, August 25, 2017.
• Adams, Julia and Brückner, Hannah (2015). “Wikipedia, sociology, and the promise and pitfalls of Big Data,” Big Data and Society, July-December 2015: 1-5.
• Adams, Julia and Shughrue, Chris (2015). “Bottlenecks and East Indies Companies: Modeling the Geography of Agency in Mercantilist Enterprises,” in Emily Erikson (ed.) Chartering Capitalism: Organizing Markets, States, and Publics (Political Power and Social Theory, Volume 29) Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp. 207 - 218.
• Adams, Julia and Steinmetz, George (2015). “Sovereignty and Sociology: From State Theory to Theories of Empire”. (Book Series: Political Power and Social Theory). Emerald Publishing.
• Adams, Julia and Wang, Liping Liping, “Interlocking Patrimonialisms and State Formation in Qing China and Early Modern Europe,” in J. Adams and M. M. Charrad, Special Editors. (2011) Patrimonial Power in the Modern World, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 636 (July): Washington, DC: Sage. 
• Adams, Julia (2011). “1-800-How-Am-I-Driving? Agency in Social Science History,” Social Science History, vol. 35 #1, pp. 1-17
• Adams, Julia and Reed, Ariail Issac (2011). “Culture in the Transitions to Modernity: Seven Pillars of a New Research Agenda,” Theory & Society, Volume 40, Issue 3, pp 247-272.
• Adams, Julia and Weakliem, David (2011) “What Do We Mean by “Class Politics”?” Politics & Society Volume 39 Issue 4 December 2011 pp. 475 - 496.
• Adams, Julia (2010). “The Unknown James Coleman: Culture and History in Foundations of Social Theory,” pp 237-294 in Contemporary Sociology, Vol 39, #3, 253-8, 2010.
• Adams, Julia (2008). “Scholarly Controversy: The Familial State,” pp 237-294 in Political Power and Social Theory, Vol 19, 2008.
• Adams, Julia and Orloff, Ann Ann (2005). “Defending Modernity? High Politics, Feminist Anti-Modernism and the Place of Gender,” in Politics and Gender, 1 (1).
• Adams, Julia (2005). “The Rule of the Father: Patriarchy and Patrimonialism in Early Modern Europe,” pp. 237-266 in C. Camic, P. S. Gorski and D. M. Trubek (eds.), Max Weber’s Economy and Society: A Critical Companion. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
• Adams, Julia and Tasleem, Padamsee (2001). “Signs and Regimes: Rereading Feminist Work on Welfare States,” Social Politics, 8 (1): 1-23.
• Adams, Julia (1999). “Culture in Rational-Choice Theories of State Formation,” pp. 98-122 in G. Steinmetz (ed.), State/Culture: State Formation After the Cultural Turn. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
• Adams, Julia (1996). “Principals and Agents, Colonialists and Company Men: The Decay of Colonial Control in the Dutch East Indies,” American Sociological Review, 61 (1): 12-28.
• Adams, Julia and McLanahan, Sara (1987) “Parenthood and Psychological Wellbeing,” Annual Review of Sociology 13, eds. R. Turner and J. Short. Palo Alto, CA: Annual Reviews: 237-57

Series Editor

• Politics, History and Culture Series (published by Duke University Press): Julia Adams and George Steinmetz, co-editors.

Courses and Seminars

Undergraduate

• SOCY018, The Sociological Imagination (Freshman Seminar)
• SOCY115, Contemporary American Society
• SOCY160, Methods of Inquiry
• SOCY210, Sociology of the Welfare State

Graduate

• SOCY542, Sociological Theory
• SOCY557, Political Sociology
• SOCY520/HIST972, Revolutions 
• SOCY560/PLSC734, Comparative Research Workshop
• SOCY590b/HIST610b, Early Modern Empires: Theory and History.
• SOCY612, Agency and Action.