Societies Past and Present

Thomas Burr is Associate Professor of Sociology at Illinois State University. As an undergraduate double major in Political Science and Latin American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, he became deeply interested in global issues. He followed this interest at San Francisco State University, where he earned an M.A. in International Relations with a thesis on the history of global political culture. At U.C. Davis he earned an M.A. in History and a Ph.D. in Sociology, specializing in comparative history and economic sociology, for which he researched how producers and consumers related in product markets, using the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century U.S. and French bicycle markets as a comparative case study. From this study he published articles on producer-consumer collaboration on market formation, market trajectories, market institutions, and product innovation. This research, and this book on global historical sociology, has required reading in economics, marketing, psychology, anthropology, and archaeology, and has therefore cultivated his strong interest in interdisciplinary historical social science. In addition to researching and teaching global sociology, he teaches economic development, popular culture, theory, and research methods. He is increasingly interested in historical methodology, especially the use of secondary historical sources. He lives in Normal, Illinois with his wife and daughter.