Gianfranco Poggi (1956)

I was born in Italy, in 1934, and educated there. In 1956, shortly after graduating in law at Padua, I became a graduate student in sociology at UCB. In 1957-58 I worked in Rome as an assistant on an American political science research project, returning to Berkeley the following year, and leaving after two years to work on my doctoral dissertation on Italian Catholic Action. I studied chiefly under Lipset, Bendix, Kornhauser, Lowenthal. I returned to Italy in 1961, and received my Berkeley PhD in 1963. In 1964 I joined the sociology dept. newly founded by Tom Burns at Edinburgh, and remained there 24 years (though during this time I also taught in the US, Canada, and Australia). In 1988 I joined the sociology faculty at the University of Virginia, which I left in 1965, returning to Italy in order to teach at the European University Institute (Florence). My current (and last!) post is at the University of Trento. My two main research and teaching fields are modern political institutions (I have published two books and several essays on the state and related subjects) and the 'classics' (I have published on Tocqueville, Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and Simmel).