Dr. Matthew Soener

Biography

Prior to joining the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Matthew Soener worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Sciences Po in Paris. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Ohio State University in 2018 and earned his BA from the University of Kansas. His research interests encompass Economic Sociology, Environmental Sociology, Theory, Political Economy, Global Transnational Sociology, and Political Sociology. His work intricately combines classic themes of political economy and economic sociology to understand contemporary socio-economic problems, with a broad focus on how global capitalism has transformed over the past half-century. At the heart of his research is a significant shift in the balance-of-power and material distribution. He has studied aspects of financialization, restructuring in global production, corporate power, and state theory. His projects on inequality examine labor-capital dynamics, particularly focusing on workplace wage gaps and applying these themes to modern challenges like climate change. He is interested in the forces driving greenhouse gas emissions and the implications of exploitation, austerity, and stagnating growth, and aims to explore the historical roots of state economic energy policies from the postwar period to the 1970s.

Research Interests

Courses