Volker H. Schmidt studied political science, cultural studies, and sociology at the Universities of Marburg, Birmingham and Bielefeld, where he graduated with a Master’s Degree in sociology in 1987. He finished his academic training with a PhD in 1995 at the University of Bremen and a habilitation in 2000 at the University of Mannheim. In between, he spent the academic year 1997-1998 as a J.F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow at the Center for European Studies, Harvard University. In December 2000, he joined the National University of Singapore. During the academic year 2008-2009, he was a Visiting Fellow at the Excellence Cluster “Religion and Politics in Modernity”, University of Münster, at whose Center for Advanced Study in Bioethics he also held two months-long fellowships in the summers of 2010 and 2011. In the academic year 2013-2014, he spent another six months as Fellow at this center plus six months as Fellow at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), University of Bielefeld. Before moving to Singapore, most of his work focused on questions of distributive justice and the allocation of health care. Since then, he has broadened the scope of his work considerably, both substantively and spatially, by adding the analysis of large scale social change in East Asia and beyond. The core of this latter work is constituted by the concept of “Gobal Modernity”. In recent years, he has focused on problems in the sociological conceptualization of the discipline's most important concept, "society", on whose genealogy he is currently working.
Contemporary Social Theory; Global Transformations; Science, Technology and Society; Social Thought and Theory; Sociological Theory; Welfare and Social Justice; Understanding Globalization
Downloads
global social change; conceptual analysis; social theory; health and social policy; normative and empirical analyses of justice.
BOOKS/MONOGRAPHS AUTHORED
CHAPTERS IN BOOKS
EDITORIAL WORK ON BOOKS
ARTICLES IN JOURNALS
2002-2014: President of the ISA's Research Committee 35 (Conceptual and Terminological Analysis (COCTA).