Director, Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies (on leave 2025-2026)
jtorpey@gc.cuny.edu
@JohnCTorpey

John Torpey is Presidential Professor of Sociology and History and Director of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author or editor of a number of books, including Intellectuals, Socialism, and Dissent: The East German Opposition and its Legacy (University of Minnesota Press, 1995); The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (Cambridge University Press, 2000; 2nd ed. 2018); Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World (edited with Jane Caplan; Princeton University Press, 2001); Politics and the Past: On Repairing Historical Injustices (editor, Rowman & Littlefield, 2004); Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe: Transatlantic Relations after the Iraq War (co-edited with Daniel Levy and Max Pensky; Verso, 2005), Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: On Reparations Politics (Harvard University Press, 2006; paperback ed. Rutgers University Press, 2017); The Post-Secular in Question (co-edited with Philip Gorski, David Kyuman Kim, and Jonathan van Antwerpen; NYU Press, 2012); Legal Integration of Islam: A Transatlantic Comparison (with Christian Joppke; Harvard University Press, 2013); Transformations of Warfare in the Contemporary World (edited with David Jacobson; Temple University Press, 2017); The Three Axial Ages: Moral, Material, Mental (Rutgers University Press, 2017); The Decline of Antiracism and the Future of Progressive Politics (Routledge, 2026); Revitalizing the United Nations: Making and Keeping the Peace (Routledge, 2026).  During 2015-2016, he was President of the Eastern Sociological Society.