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Matthias Leanza has been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Basel since 2025. His professorship, supported by a Starting Grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), is situated at the interface of Historical Sociology and Sociology History. He investigates how social sciences engaged with and actively shaped decolonization after World War II. His research focuses on concepts of societal and political modernization that envision a world after the end of empires and contribute to the establishment of the sovereign nation-state as a global norm. Leanza has a PhD from the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg and has received the Erasmus Prize for Liberal Arts Sciences from the University College Freiburg in 2017 for his dissertation on the preventive construction of the future. He is a founding and board member of the Working Group on Historical Sociology and is actively involved in organizing conferences within the section of Cultural Sociology of the German Sociological Association. His research interests include the central importance of empires and colonialism for sociological theory. Leanza has held fellowships and visiting positions at prestigious research institutions, including the University of Michigan, the University of Virginia, the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin, and the Center for Interdisciplinary Research at the University of Bielefeld. Most recently, he was a Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg “global dis:connect” at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich for the academic year 2023–24.
The University of Basel generally requires C1 level proficiency in the language of instruction. For most English-taught Masters, TOEFL (min 92-95) or IELTS (min 7.0) is the standard.