Dr Jack Palmer

Profile

I rejoined the School of Sociology and Social Policy as Lecturer in June 2024, having previously worked across various teaching and research roles between 2016-22. From 2022-24, I was a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Leeds Trinity University. Since 2024, I am director of the Bauman Institute.

I work at the intersections of historical sociology and the sociology of knowledge. I am interested in the relationship between social change and the development of intellectual standpoints, and my research has especially considered the way that experiences of violent social transformation have been registered in intellectual and cultural forms.

My first book, based on PhD research funded by a University of Leeds Research Scholarship (2013-2017), is a study of trajectories of modernity in the Great Lakes of Africa (Entanglements of Modernity, Colonialism and Genocide: Burundi and Rwanda in Historical Sociological Perspective [Routledge, 2018]). Through a historical-sociological study of a region long-neglected by Western sociologists, it challenges Eurocentric and progressivist assumptions in sociological theorisations of modernity.

Funded by a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship (2018-2021), I have also published extensively on the lifework of the major social thinker, Zygmunt Bauman, including a sole-authored book, Zygmunt Bauman and the West: A Sociology of Intellectual Exile (McGill-Queens University Press, 2023). The book received an honorary mention in the 2024 Bronislaw Malinowski Prize of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America. I discussed it in this episode of the New Books in Sociology podcast.

I am also co-editor of Revisiting Modernity and the Holocaust: Heritage, Dilemmas, Extensions (Routledge, 2022), and part of the editorial team for a 3-volume series of unpublished and rarely accessed writings of Zygmunt Bauman for Polity Press (2021-2024). I was centrally involved in the development of the Papers of Janina and Zygmunt Bauman, a public archive of international significance held at the University of Leeds. You can find our more about these projects in this video.

Responsibilities

• Director of the Bauman Institute
• UG lead

Research interests

At present, I am working on several projects. This includes an expansive sociological study of intellectuals in exile across a range of post-1930s contexts, building from my work on Bauman. Here, I seek to theorise ‘exilic interventions’ as a specific mode of claim-making and intellectual positioning, and an ‘exilic republic of letters’ as a transnational intellectual network. Extending my work on genocide, I am also developing a project on ‘ecologies of destruction’ which explores the intersections of natural and social destruction. As part of this project, I have written on the entangled conceptual histories of genocide, extinction and interpretation, and by extension the role of concepts as effective forces in social life. I also continue to work on post-war intellectuals and ideas, with a particular emphasis on sociological interpretations of the Holocaust and on events of decolonisation.

• Zygmunt Bauman and the West: Exile, Culture, Dialogue

Qualifications

• PhD Sociology and Social Policy
• MA Social and Political Thought
• UG Media Studies and Entertainment Technology

Professional memberships

• Fellow of Advance HE
• Cultural Politics - Book Reviews Editor
• Centre for Jewish Studies
• British Sociological Association
• European Sociological Association
• British and Irish Association for Holocaust Studies

Student education

I contribute research-informed teaching across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in SSP. I also contribute to faculty-wide teaching on the critical role of the social sciences in public understanding and experience of emergencies. I have a developing interest in object-based learning, and am involved in a school-led initiative in this area. Moreover, I have a keen interest in the history of the teaching of sociology, especially in extramural settings.