Robin Wagner-Pacifici

ROBIN WAGNER-PACIFICI is currently Professor of Sociology at the New School for Social Research, after having taught at Swarthmore College for over two decades. In addition to her most recent publications, she is the author of Discourse and Destruction: The City of Philadelphia vs MOVE, University Of Chicago Press, 1994, and The Moro Morality Play: Terrorism as Social Drama, University Of Chicago Press, 1986, and in the field of memory studies, she has most notably co-authored with Barry Schwartz “The Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past,” in the American Journal of Sociology, 1991. She won the American Sociological Association’s Culture Section Best Book Award in 2001 .

Current work in progress includes further development of a sociological theory of event shape-taking and trajectory (event restlessness and undecidability) with focus on 9/11 and the election of Barack Obama; a collaborative project mapping sovereign relations in the realm of security strategy (including qualitative and quantitative analysis of networks of sovereign and semi-sovereign entities in US National Security Strategy reports); and theorizing the boundaries and resolutions of social, political, and military conflict.