Dmitry Kurakin

Fellow

Modernity Seminar Co-director 2025-2026; Professor at the National Research University Higher School of Economics

Dmitry Kurakin is the Director of the Hope and Crisis Lab at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, where he is also a Fellow and Associate Director of the Modernity Seminar.

Previously he was Full Professor at HSE University, where he founded the Moscow Centre for Cultural Sociology and directed Russia’s largest longitudinal cohort study of life trajectories. He is also a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University, where he has recently served as Acting Associate Director (Spring 2025) and Visiting Professor in the Department of Sociology (2023–2025).

His research focuses on the emotional dimension of culture, the Durkheimian tradition, the theory of the sacred, and the intersections of culture with cognition, narrative, and temporality. His current work develops a sociology of enchantment, which locates the sources of fascination, intrigue, and wonder within modern life — among cities and screens, strangers and stories, futures and hopes. The Hope and Crisis Lab carries that program into the study of hope. His latest book, A Sociology of Mystery, written with Philip Smith, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. He has published widely in leading journals — Theory and Society, British Journal of Sociology, European Sociological Review, American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Sociology of Education, Cultural Sociology, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, and Journal of Classical Sociology, among many others. He also edited and wrote the Introduction to the Russian translation of Émile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.

View his website here: dmitrykurakin.org

Kurakin, Dmitry. “Emotions in Meaning-Making: Toward a Sociological Theory of Cathexis.” Sociological Forum, 2025.

Kurakin, Dmitry. “Narratives We Live By: Sequentiality and Timeliness in Temporal Structuring of Action.” Theory and Society, vol. 54, no. 4, 2025, pp. 579–608.

Kurakin, Dmitry. “Cathectic Mechanisms of Cosmetic Surgery: Operation and Recovery as a Ritual-Like Process.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, vol. 54, no. 4, 2024, pp. 448–468.

Kislitsyn, Dmitry, Peter Meylakhs, Dmitry Schapov, Dmitry Kurakin, and Ekaterina Alexandrova. “Moral Values and Vaccination Behavior in Russia during the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Preventive Medicine, 2024, pp. 1–21.

Kurakin, Dmitry. “Culture and Cognition: The Durkheimian Principle of Sui Generis Synthesis vs. Cognitive-Based Models of Culture.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology, vol. 8, no. 1, 2020, pp. 63–89.

Kurakin, Dmitry. “The Cultural Mechanics of Mystery: Structures of Emotional Attraction in Competing Interpretations of the Dyatlov Pass Tragedy.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology, vol. 7, no. 1, 2019, pp. 101–127.

Kurakin, Dmitry. “The Sacred, Profane, Pure, Impure, and Social Energization of Culture.” The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Sociology, edited by Wayne Brekhus and Gabe Ignatow, Oxford UP, 2019, pp. 485–506.

Binder, Werner, and Dmitry Kurakin. “Biography and Form of Life: Toward a Cultural Analysis of Narrative Interviews.” Sociologia, vol. 51, no. 6, 2019, pp. 563–583.

Yastrebov, Gordey, Yuliya Kosyakova, and Dmitry Kurakin. “Slipping Past the Test: Heterogeneous Effects of Social Background in the Context of Inconsistent Selection Mechanisms in Higher Education.” Sociology of Education, vol. 91, no. 3, 2018, pp. 224–241.

Kurakin, Dmitry. “The Sociology of Culture in the Soviet Union and Russia: The Missed Turn.” Cultural Sociology, vol. 11, no. 4, 2017, pp. 394–415.

Bessudnov, Alexey, Dmitry Kurakin, and Valeriya Malik. “The Myth about Universal Higher Education: Russia in the International Context.” Educational Studies Moscow, no. 3, 2017, pp. 83–109.

Kosyakova, Yuliya, Dmitry Kurakin, and Hans-Peter Blossfeld. “Horizontal and Vertical Gender Segregation in Russia—Changes upon Labour Market Entry before and after the Collapse of the Soviet Regime.” European Sociological Review, vol. 31, no. 5, 2015, pp. 573–590.

Kurakin, Dmitry. “Reassembling the Ambiguity of the Sacred: A Neglected Inconsistency in Readings of Durkheim.” Journal of Classical Sociology, vol. 15, no. 4, 2015, pp. 377–395.

Kurakin, Dmitry. “Literature as a Meaningful Life Laboratory.” Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, vol. 44, no. 3, 2010, pp. 227–234.