Peter Wagner is ICREA Research Professor in the Department of Sociological Theory, Philosophy of Law and Methodology of the Social Sciences at the University of Barcelona. His research interests are in social and political theory and in historical, political and cultural sociology with a particular emphasis on the comparative analysis of contemporary social configurations and their historical trajectories. Since 2010 he is the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council-funded Advanced Grant project “Trajectories of modernity: comparing non-European and European varieties”. His recent book publications include: Modernity: Understanding the Present (Cambridge: Polity, 2012) and Modernity as Experience and Interpretation. A New Sociology of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2008) as well as the co-edited volumes The Greek polis and the Invention of Democracy: a Politico-cultural Transformation and its Interpretations (with Johann Arnason and Kurt Raaflaub, Oxford: Blackwell, forthcoming) and Varieties of World-Making: Beyond Globalization (with Nathalie Karagiannis, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007).
 
Previous appointments include: 2006-2010, Professor of Sociology, U of Trento; 1999-2006, Professor of Social and Political Theory, European University Institute, Florence; 1996-2006, Professor of Sociology, U of Warwick (on leave 1999-2006); Visiting Professorships at Université de Paris 8 (2011); Université catholique de Louvain-la-neuve (chaire Jacques Leclercq, 2009-10); U of Cape Town (Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities, 2009-10); U of Bergen (2001); Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris (2001; 1998); U of California at Berkeley (1997; 1996); Fellow of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences, Uppsala; Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (1990-91); Visiting Research Fellow, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Paris (1994); 1983-1995, Research Fellow at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung; 1993, habilitation in sociology, Free U of Berlin; 1989, PhD in political science, Free U of Berlin.