Joachim Savelsberg
267 19th Ave S
Minneapolis,
MN
55455
Born, raised, and educated in Germany, I moved—after year-long fellowships at the Johns Hopkins and Harvard universities – to the United States to take a position at the University of Minnesota in 1989. Here I am a professor of sociology and, by courtesy, law as well as the Arsham and Charlotte Ohanessian Chair.
Much of my recent work addresses representations and memories of mass violence, especially through legal intervention. Simultaneously, I continue to contribute to themes that were previously at the center of my agenda. They include institutional conditions of knowledge about crime and punishment in international and temporal comparison and associated dynamics of criminal punishment; comparative imprisonment rates; the sociology of criminology; sentencing guidelines; and the criminalization of white-collar offenses.
Along the way, I served, with my colleague Timothy Johnson, as editor of the Law & Society Review, and as the elected chair of the Sections for the Sociology of Law and the Sociology of Human Rights of the American Sociological Association and of the Theory Division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems.
I kept my contacts to Europe alive and expanded them into Africa, aided by fellowships or visiting professorships at the Humboldt University (Berlin), the Ludwig Maximilian University (Munich), the Karl Franzens University (Graz), the Rockefeller Foundation at Bellagio, the Käte-Hamburger Center for Advanced Study “Law as Culture" (Bonn), the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (South Africa), and the Paris Institute for Advanced Study. My publications have appeared in English, German, French, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, and Chinese. Movements across continents have inspired insights into globalization and cross-national comparison.
Educational Background
- Dr. rer. pol.: Sociology, University of Trier, 1982
- Diplom Volkswirt soz. wiss. R.: Sociology, political economy, and public policy, University of Cologne, 1978
Specialties
- Sociology of Knowledge, Memory & Representations
- Law, Crime & Punishment
- Human Rights
- Comparative
- Theory