Julia Adams (sociologist)


Julia Potter Adams is an American sociologist who works in the area of comparative and historical sociology. Julia Adams is a professor of Sociology. She conducts research in the areas of state building, gender and family, social theory and knowledge, early modern European politics, and Colonialism and empire. Her current research focuses on the historical sociology of agency relations and modernity, gender, race, and the representation of academic knowledge on Wikipedia and on other digital platforms. Adams is Professor of Sociology and International & Area Studies and Head of Grace Hopper College, Yale. She also co-directs YaleCHESS and is on the Board of Reed College.

Early life and education

Adams attended Reed College. She completed graduate work at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Career

Adams became an assistant professor at the University of Michigan in 1992. She was later promoted to become an associate professor. She moved to Yale University in 2004.
She was president of the Social Science History Association from 2008 to 2009. Her presidential address covered historical sociological topics including agency, labor, and principal-agent relations. In 2010, she was appointed Joseph C. Fox Fellowship Director at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. In 2013, Professor Benjamin Cashore was appointed as the new Director.
Adams received a National Science Foundation grant in 2013 to conduct a study of the relationship between gender bias and the portrayal of academics in Wikipedia She collaborated with Hannah Bruckner of New York University-Abu Dhabi. Some of the resulting work has been published in peer-reviewed articles.
In 2005, Adams published two books on historical sociology: The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe
as the sole author, and Remaking Modernity with colleagues Ann Shola Orloff and Elisabeth Clemens. The latter book surveys the field of historical sociology and proposes a third wave for historical interpretation and analysis in the social sciences.
. In an interview with MacMillan Report at Yale University in 2010, Adams' discusses her research regarding large scale forms of patriarchal politics and the historical sociology of history relations. She discusses with interviewer Marilyn Wilkes her background research regarding the familial state and contradictions of agency in contemporary America. This background research was the development of her book, The Familial State, which focuses on elite families in large scale political development in European countries. She found this research important because of its academic importance and for the public to have a better understanding of the world around them. Adams often uses the term scholarship in her research. Scholarship, according to Adams', means patriarchal power in Twenty First century Inequality and Capitalism. By studying Holland’s renowned families, who were at the time both state-builders and merchant capitalists, during the seventeenth century Dutch Golden Age, Adams discovered how the family patriarchs shaped the first great wave of European colonialism which led to the influence of European political development in modern ways.
Adams is also accredited for her research regarding Wikipedia with Hannah Brückner who is a professor of Social Research and Public Policy at New York University-Abu Dhabi and is a leading sociologist on life course, inequality, health, gender and sexuality. This research project titled, “Wikipedia and the Democratization of Academic Knowledge” is a National Science Foundation funded study of how academics and academic subjects are represented on Wikipedia. The research gathered by Adams and Brückner is focused on comparing the structure and statistics of scientific evidence and social scientific evidence with their Wikipedia entries to better understand the development of Wikipedia as a functional and legitimate online encyclopedia.

Publications

Books