Chair of Social and Related Sciences (Class A2)
Biography
Björn Wittrock is Chair of Social Sciences and Vice-President ex officio of Academia Europaea. He is University Professor emeritus, Uppsala University and was a Founding Director of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study and its Principal in the years 1996-2018. He was also one of the founders of SIAS, a group of ten leading institutes for advanced study. He has been President of the International Institute of Sociology and co-organised four of its world congresses.
He has served on boards and committees of national and international research councils, including the ERC and the committee for the Holberg Prize. Recently, he has chaired the juries for the Erasmus Medal, for the Barcelona Hypatia European Science Prize and for the social sciences and humanities of the Falling Walls Awards.
Björn Wittrock has published five monographs and fifteen anthologies with leading international publishers, such as Cambridge University Press, Berghahn and Brill. He has written on the history and sociology of the social sciences, the history of universities but in recent years most extensively on social theory and world history. He has re-examined the hypothesis of the Axial Age and elaborated a distinctly non-teleological interpretation of it. He has proposed the idea of cultural crystallizations across Afro-Eurasia in the first centuries of the second millennium CE as a non-Eurocentric alternative to standard accounts of this era. (On these two foci, please see his contributions to volumes IV and V of the Cambridge World History.) He was also one the scholars who first explored the idea of so-called multiple modernities (see Daedalus, Winter 2000).
He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Academia Europaea and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been awarded the Torgny Segerstedt Medal (Uppsala University 1998); honorary doctorate (University of Tartu 2003), the Federal Cross of Merit (Germany 2008); the King’s Medal in Gold (Sweden 2009), the Gustavus Adolphus Medal in Gold (Uppsala University 2017), the Georges Sarton Medal (Ghent University 2023) and the Leibniz Medal (Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities 2023).