Ermakoff Ivan

Coordonnées professionnelles

Cmpus Condorcet
EHESS-CESPRA
2, Cours des Humanités
93300 Aubervilliers

University of Wisconsin-Madison
Department of sociology
College of Letters & Science
500 Lincoln Dr,
53706 Madison
Etats-Unis

ermakoff [a] ssc.wisc.edu

Research Interest Statement

My research agenda is centered on transition processes and collective situations in which individuals are confronted with decisions that challenge their sense of self-interest, preservation or identity. I have been investigating aristocrats facing new matrimonial regulations in Europe in the central middle ages, parliamentarians confronted with the prospect of their own collective abdication, political leaders devising strategies of political survival and/or democratic consolidation in times of democratic crisis, and civil servants confronted with the task of enforcing inhumane policies. In these different instances, to identify collective processes and reconstruct the specifics of the relevant empirical cases, I draw on multifaceted tools of analysis—formal, quantitative and hermeneutic—applied to a variety of historical sources. This approach combines historical research with a set of methods geared to probing the empirical soundness of hypotheses that can be transposed to different times and places.

Enseignements 2021-2022

Histoire et historiographie de la Shoah

Selected Publications

Books

Ruling Oneself Out. A Theory of Collective Abdication. Duke University Press. « Politics, History and Culture » series. April 2008
2012 Lewis A. Coser Award for Theoretical Agenda Setting (American Sociological Association, Theory Section)
2010 European Academy of Sociology Best Book Award
2009 Barrington Moore Best Book Award (American Sociological Association, Comparative and Historical Sociology Section)
Pour une microhistoire de la Shoah [Microhistory of the Holocaust], Le Genre Humain, Paris, Seuil, September 2012, 52, co-edited with Claire Zalc, Tal Bruttman, and Nicolas Mariot.

Articles

« The Structure of Contingency, » American Journal of Sociology, July 2015, 121(1): 64-125.
« Exceptional Cases: Epistemic contributions and Normative Expectations, » The European Journal of Sociology, November 2014, 55:(2): 223-243.
« Rational Choice may take over, » pp.89-107 in Bourdieu and Historical Analysis, edited by Philip Gorski, Duke University Press. 2013.
« Patrimony and collective capacity. An Analytical Outline, » Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, July 2011, 636: 182-203.
« Theory of Practice, Rational Choice and Historical Change, » Theory and Society, August 2010, 39: 527-553.
« Motives and Alignment, » Social Science History, Special Section: Politics, Collective Uncertainty, and the Renunciation of Power, Spring 2010, 34(1): 97-109.
« Patrimonial Rise and Decline. The Strange Case of The Familial State, » September 2008, Political Power and Social Theory, 19: 255-273.
« Strukturelle Zwänge und zufällige Geschehnisse » [Structural Constraints and Incidental Happenings], March 2001, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, Sonderheft 19: Struktur und Ereignis, pp. 224-256.
« Prelates and Princes: Aristocratic Marriages, Canon Law Prohibitions and Shifts in Norms and Patterns of Domination in the Central Middle Ages. » July 1997. American Sociological Review. 62:405-422.