Director: Dmitry Kurakin, IASC Fellow

Founding Director of the Hope and Crisis Lab and a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, University of Virginia

Dmitry Kurakin is a social theorist and cultural sociologist at the University of Virginia, where he is also 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.

Associate Director: Isaac Ariail Reed, IASC Senior Fellow

Thomas C. Sorensen Professor of Political and Social Thought and Professor of Sociology, University of Virginia; Senior Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture

Isaac Ariail Reed is Thomas C. Sorensen Professor of Political and Social Thought and Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture in Charlottesville, Virginia. His work began with studies of the Salem Witch Trials and hermeneutic sociology, expanded into a study of interpretation and explanation in the human sciences, and then to the sociology of power and transitions to modernity. He has written about the Whiskey Rebellion, Bacon’s Rebellion, the French Revolution, the Cold War, science fiction, the idea of the human sciences, and the intellectual history of political and social theory. At the core of his work are three ideas: (1) transitions to modernity transformed social and political life; (2) signification is a source of immense variation in history and society, because it is a fundamental component of action, motivation, and performance; and (3) social structure may be usefully conceptualized as hierarchical networks of agency relations. He graduated with a B.A. in Mathematics and Sociology & Anthropology from Swarthmore College in 2000. In 2007, he earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from Yale University. He is the author of Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the Use of Theory in the Human Sciences (2011), Power in Modernity: Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the King’s Two Bodies (2020), and Sociology as a Human Science: Essays on Interpretation and Causal Pluralism (2023), and the co-editor of Social Theory Now (2017) and The New Pragmatist Sociology: Inquiry, Agency, and Democracy (2022).

David Kretz

Postdoctoral Associate, Humanities Program (Directed Studies), Yale University

David Kretz is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Humanities Program at Yale, teaching in Directed Studies. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought and Department of Germanic Studies. Prior to that, he studied philosophy, literature, and intellectual history in Paris, Berlin, and his hometown Vienna.

His work reconstructs translation concepts operative in historical translation practices — via digital, sociological, and humanistic methods — to restate, on their basis, the old concept of translatio for our late modern conditions. Where premodern notions of translatio sought to capture loss-less transfers of rights and knowledge-forms, practice-grounded concepts of translational action, he proposes, capture precisely those modes of historical agency that center a reckoning with the unprecedented loss of cultural forms, and entire worlds, constitutive of Anthropocenic modernity. In this way, philological inquiry into translation practices can provide resources for a critical, pragmatist philosophy of history and social theory.

A co-edited volume, Hegel and MacIntyre: Reason in History (Routledge, forthcoming), is due out in the coming months. His writing has appeared in International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity, Revue Philosophie, Raisons Politiques, Pragmata, Journal for the History of Modern Theology, Kronos Quarterly, German Quarterly, Yearbook of Translational Hermeneutics, and a number of edited volumes.

Jason L. Mast

Hannah Arendt Fellow, Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, and the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities

Jason L. Mast’s research investigates how populism, ethno-nationalism, and isolationism have rippled through recent elections in Western democracies, unsettling the multicultural, globalist, and neoliberal trajectories many had assumed were durable. His writings on the American case appear in the edited volumes Populism in the Civil Sphere (2021) and Politics of Meaning / Meaning of Politics (2019); with Daniel Šuber, he has written on the German case in the International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society (2024). He also examines how developments in cognitive psychology, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience challenge the way the social sciences and humanities theorize mind, culture, and society. Mast earned his PhD in sociology from UCLA and has held fellowships at Warwick, Goethe University Frankfurt, and Trento/Yale (Marie Skłodowska-Curie). He is currently a Hannah Arendt Fellow at the University of Oldenburg and the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Adam Potkay

William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Humanities, William & Mary; editor, PMLA

Adam Potkay is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Humanities at William and Mary and editor of the journal PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association of America).

His scholarly focus is wide-ranging, covering literature and philosophy, Enlightenment and Romanticism, poetry and poetics, rhetoric and pedagogy, affect theory and ethics, the world novel, and more. Potkay’s publications include the books Freedom and Determinism in Literature and Philosophy (forthcoming, 2026), Hope: A Literary History (2022), Wordsworth’s Ethics (2015), The Story of Joy from the Bible to Late Romanticism (2007), The Passion for Happiness: Samuel Johnson and David Hume (2000), and The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume (1994). He is also the editor of several influential volumes, from Black Atlantic Writers of the Eighteenth Century (1995) to The Cambridge History of Rhetoric (forthcoming, 2026).

Cassandra Sever

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, The Lumen Christi Institute, University of Chicago

Cassandra Sever is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Lumen Christi Institute at the University of Chicago. She is a social theorist whose research examines the cultural conditions that make common life possible and what happens when they break down. Her current book project, The Cultural Order: Meaning, Orientation, and the Conditions of Shared Reality, reinterprets Durkheim’s account of religion and social order to develop a theory of cultural order and crisis, tracing these dynamics through persistent polarization, antisemitism, extremist movements, and deaths of despair. Her work has appeared in outlets including Sociological Theory, Theory and Society, and Society.

Jarrett Zigon, IASC Fellow

Porterfield Chair of Bioethics and Professor of Anthropology, University of Virginia

Jarrett Zigon is the Porterfield Chair of Bioethics and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia. His interests include the anthropology of ethics; bioethics; philosophy and social theory; addiction; mental health as existential health; social change; artificial intelligence and ethics. He has been interested in hope in relation to ethics and human existence for twenty-five years, and has written about this both ethnographically and theoretically in a number of publications. Combining continental philosophy with an anthropological perspective, he explores these interests in his most recent books How Is It Between Us: Relational Ethics and Care for the World; A War on People: Drug User Politics and a New Ethics of Community; and Disappointment: Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Worldbuilding, among other publications.

Spring 2027

Tue Jan 26 — Work-in-progress session

Tue Feb 16 — Reading group

Mon Mar 1-Wed Mar 3 — Inaugural gathering · Watson Manor, University of Virginia · public day Tue Mar 2

Wed Mar 3 — Guest event

Tue Mar 16 — Reading group

Tue Apr 13 — Hope: A Literary History; selected readings from the book and a discussion with the author, Adam Potkay.

Tue May 4 — Year-end conference — the Lab’s section