Book Talk | Julia Sonnevend | Charm: How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics

Join the Institute for Public Knowledge on September 23rd at 5:30 PM for a book talk with Julia Sonnevend in conversation with John Jost and Iddo Tavory. She will discuss her new book Charm: How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics.

Julia Sonnevend is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Communications at The New School for Social Research in New York. She is a sociologist of global culture, focusing on the events, icons, symbols and charismatic personalities of public life. Sonnevend is the author of Charm: How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics (Princeton University Press), Stories Without Borders: The Berlin Wall and the Making of a Global Iconic Event (Oxford University Press), and co-editor of Education and Social Media: Toward a Digital Future (MIT Press). Her work has been published in interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journals including New Media & Society; Information, Communication & Society; International Journal of Press/Politics; Media, Culture & Society and the American Journal of Cultural Sociology. She is also active in public-facing scholarship; check out her recent op-ed in Time magazine. Sonnevend received her PhD in Communications from Columbia University, her Master of Laws degree from Yale Law School, and her Juris Doctorate and Master of Arts degrees in German Studies and Aesthetics from Eötvös Loránd University Budapest. She grew up in Hungary.

John T. Jost is Professor of Psychology and Politics and a Faculty Affiliate in Sociology and the Center for Data Science as well as Co-Director of the Center for Social and Political Behavior at New York University. His research, which addresses stereotyping, prejudice, intergroup relations, political ideology, social justice, social media usage, and system justification theory, has been funded by the National Science Foundation and has appeared in top scientific journals and received national and international media attention. He has published over 250 articles and 6 books, including A Theory of System Justification (Harvard University Press, 2020), which was a finalist for the PROSE Award for Excellence in Scholarly Publishing, and Left & Right: The Psychological Significance of a Political Distinction (Oxford University Press, 2021), which received the Juliette & Alexander George Outstanding Political Psychology Book Award. He has received numerous honors and awards, including the Gordon Allport Intergroup Relations Prize (three times), Erik Erikson Award for Early Career Research Achievement in Political Psychology, International Society for Self and Identity Early Career Award, Society for Personality and Social Psychology Theoretical Innovation Prize, Society of Experimental Social Psychology Career Trajectory Award, Carol & Ed Diener Mid-Career Award, the Kurt Lewin Award for Distinguished Research on Social Issues, and the Morton Deutsch Award for Distinguished Scholarly and Practical Contributions to Social Justice.

Iddo Tavory is Professor of sociology at NYU. He is broadly interested in the interactional and experiential patterns through which people come to construct and understand their lives across situations. His books Abductive Analysis and Data Analysis in Qualitative Research (both with Stefan Timmermans) provide a pragmatist account that allows researchers to make the most of the surprises that emerge in the process of research. His book, Summoned, is an ethnography of a Jewish neighborhood in Los Angeles as well as a treatise on the co-constitution of interaction, identity and social worlds. His book (with Sonia Prelat and Shelly Ronen) Tangled Goods explores the relationship among goods in pro bono advertising, and theorizes the coordination of different forms of worth in action. Iddo is currently writing a theoretical manuscript on culture and interactionism as well as writing a book based on an ethnography of an advertising agency in New York. Among other awards, Iddo has received the Lewis A. Coser Award for theoretical agenda setting in sociology.