The SPS Departmental Seminar is held once a month during the academic year, and is a forum where the department as a collective (Professors, researchers, Braudel Fellows, Max Weber Fellows) comes together to hear, debate and learn about developments in sociology, political science and international relations. Speakers come from across Europe (and often further abroad), giving both a talk open to all departmental staff and a master class specifically for our PhD researchers. The talks feature recently published work or research in progress, while the master classes focus on particular theories, methods or ethical issues.
The seminar series is designed to link SPS to the best of European social science, in its various meta-theoretical and theoretical flavours, national traditions and ways of doing science.
Master Classes 13:00 – 14:30 - Seminar Room 2 (Badia Fiesolana)
Seminar Series Talks 16:30 – 18:00 - Seminar Room 2 or Teatro (Badia Fiesolana)
Seminar Series
Date: 12 October 2022
Speaker: Erik Voeten (Georgetown University)
Talk: "The Energy Transition and Support for the Radical Right"
Master Class: "Publishing in Top Academic Journals"
Date: 16 November 2022
Speaker: Nitsan Chorev (Brown University / Fernand Braudel Fellow, SPS Department, EUI)
Talk: "Give and Take: Developmental Foreign Aid and the Pharmaceutical Industry in East Africa"
Master Class: "How to do Comparative Work from a Global, Post-Colonial Perspective"
Date: 14 December 2022
Speaker: Ronald Stuart Burt (University of Chicago / Bocconi University)
Talk: "Trust Reversal, Reputation, and Structural Holes"
Master Class: "Advances in Understanding the Network Structure of Advantage"
Date: 18 January 2023
Speaker: Melinda Mills (Oxford University)
Talk: "Genetics and Intergenerational Transmission: Occupational Status, Health and Fertility"
Master Class: "The Ethics and Challenges of Contemporary Research in the Social Sciences: Personal Data, GDPR, Security and Consent"
Date: 15 February 2023
Speaker: Vincent Pouliot (McGill University)
Talk: "Practice Theory and the Politics of Hybrid Global Governance"
Master Class: "Interpretive Process Tracing / Practice Tracing"
Date: 08 March 2023
Speaker: Waltraud Schelkle (EUI)
Talk: "The Evolution of Solidarity in the EU’s Perma-Crisis"
Date: 12 April 2023
Speaker: Ozan Aksoy (University College London)
Talk: "Hirsute Politics: Beards and Veils as Strategic Signals of Religiosity?"
Master Class: "Discovery and Analysis of Natural Experiments in the Social Sciences"
Date: 17 May 2023
Speaker: Tasha Fairfield (London School of Economics & Political Science)
Talk: "The Bayesian Revolution in Qualitative Research"
Master Class: "‘Bayesian Reasoning and Process Tracing’"
Date: 21 June 2023
Speaker: Neta Crawford (Oxford University)
Talk: "The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War"
Master Class: "Theorizing Deep Time: International Relations Over the Long Duree"
SPS departmental seminar series downloadable PDF
Last update: May 2023
English (116 KB - pdf)