Faculty

Profile

Manuela Boatcă is the 2026-2027 Theodor Heuss Visiting Professor in Sociology at The New School for Social Research. 

She is Professor of Sociology and Head of School of the Global Studies Programme at the University of Freiburg, Germany. She has a degree in English and German philology from the University of Bucharest, Romania and a PhD in sociology from the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Germany. She was Visiting Professor at IUPERJ, Rio de Janeiro in 2007/08 and Professor of Sociology of Global Inequalities at the Latin American Institute of the Freie Universität Berlin from 2012 to 2015. She has published widely on world-systems analysis, decolonial perspectives on global inequalities, gender and citizenship in modernity/coloniality, and the geopolitics of knowledge in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Manuela writes in English, German, French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and Romanian. Her work has also been translated into Hungarian, Italian, Russian, and Swedish. She is the author of Global Inequalities beyond Occidentalism (Routledge, 2016), Laboratoare ale modernității. Europa de Est și America Latină în (co)relație (IDEA, 2020) and the co-editor (with E. Gutiérrez-Rodríguez and S. Costa) of Decolonizing European Sociology. Transdisciplinary Approaches (Ashgate, 2010) and (with A. Komlosy and H.-H. Nolte) of Global Inequalities in World-Systems Perspective (Routledge 2017). Together with Anca Parvulescu, she co-authored Creolizing the Modern. Transylvania across Empires (Cornell UP, 2022), which was translated into Romanian (Editura ULBS, 2024) and German (transcript Verlag, 2025) and received the René Wellek Prize of the Modern Language Association and the Barrington Moore Award of the American Sociological Association's Section on Historical and Comparative Sociology.

Degrees Held

Ph.D. Sociology, University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Germany, 2002

B.A. English and German languages and literatures, University of Bucharest, Romania, 1997

Recent Publications

Manuela Boatcă (2026): Smelling like a Market: Investment Migration, Cunning States and the Coloniality of Citizenship in the Caribbean, Ethnic and Racial Studies special issue Situating the Migraiton Industry. Governance, Capital Accumulation and Global Dehumanization, online first.

Manuela Boatcă (2026): Global Sociology of Our Interconnected World, in: Karim Murji, Sarah Neal, and John Solomos (eds.): Introduction to Sociology, 2nd revised edition, SAGE: London, 37-54.

Manuela Boatcă (2025): Subjects, Disavowed: Romani Europeans and the Challenge of Unthinkable Histories. Transilvania 4 (2025), 42-52, https://doi.org/10.51391/trva.2025.4.04 

Fabio Santos, Manuela Boatcă (2024): Wendepunkte der Moderne: Refiguration und Transformation in der Karibik, Berliner Journal für Soziologie, 35, 127-154

Anca Parvulescu, Manuela Boatcă (2022): Creolizing the Modern. Transylvania across Empires, Cornell UP