Jonathan Bach is Professor in the Global Studies Program at The New School in New York.

Research overview

Working at the intersection of anthropology, sociology, and politics, Bach’s research explores social change following economic, political, and cultural disruption, especially in the post-socialist world. His recent work examines everyday life, material culture, and urban space in Germany and China, and he has written widely on the impact of globalization across global and local scales.

A common thread across his work is how difficult pasts unsettle and conspire with the present. Bach’s books and co-edited volumes examine places out of time, and things out of place — from the awkward afterlife of socialism in re-united Germany in What Remains, to the vexed persistence of the rural in China’s urbanization in Learning from Shenzhen, to the permutations of socialist high modernity across today’s “Global East” in Re-centering the City, to the search for “normalcy” after German reunification in Between Sovereignty and Integration. Current research examines colonial reckoning in contemporary Germany.

His articles have explored, inter alia, the role of innocence in the politics of memory, how China’s social credit system works at the intersection of merit, morality and the market; how the special economic zone emerged as a global urban form; how information technology co-evolves with civil society in post-socialist Europe; how remittances reshape ideas of citizenship and belonging; and how paranoia functions as a political category.

Bio

Jonathan Bach has taught at The New School since 2002, where he is a professor of Global Studies and a faculty affiliate in the Department of Anthropology. He served as the founding chair of the Global Studies Program and associate director of the Graduate Program in International Affairs. Bach held postdoctoral positions at Harvard and Columbia Universities after receiving his PhD in political science from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.

Bach has held visiting positions at Brown and Columbia Universities, the Center for Literature and Cultural Studies in Berlin, and the Institute for Peace Research and Security Studies in Hamburg, and been a visitor at the Humboldt University’s Institute for European Ethnology. He has received grants from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), Fulbright, and the National Science Foundation, among others. He is a faculty affiliate at Columbia University’s Center on Organizational Innovation, an Associate Member of the Humboldt University’s Center for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage, and a member of the European Studies Council at Yale University. Bach served on the inaugural Executive Committee of the Memory Studies Association and serves on the editorial boards of German Politics and Society and Sociologica.

The New School

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Email: bachj[at]newschool[dot]edu