Johan Goudsblom

Johan Goudsblom (1932) began his academic studies at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn., and continued to study Social Psychology at the University of Amsterdam. His Ph.D. thesis at that same university was on Nihilism and Culture (1960; English translation 1980). In 1966 he was a Harkness Fellow at Princeton University and the University of California, Berkeley. In 1968 he was appointed full professor of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam. He has held guest professorships and research fellowships at several universities and other institutions, including the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences and Humanities (NIAS) and All Souls College, Oxford. In 2000 he spent some time at NIAS as Guest of the Rector.

His books in English include Dutch Society (1967), Sociology in the Balance (1977), Fire and Civilization (1992), The Course of Human History (with Eric Jones and Stephen Mennell, 1996) and Mappae Mundi,  Humans and their Habitats in a Long-Term Socio-Ecological Perspective (ed. with B. de Vries, 2002)  He is the editor, with Stephen Mennell, of two books with selections from the work of Norbert Elias: The Norbert Elias Reader (Blackwell 1998) and Norbert Elias on Civilization, Power, and Knowledge (University of Chicago Press 1998).