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Massimo Rosati

Ritual and the SacredI was born in Pescara (Italy) in 1969. I grew up and did my schooling and undergraduate studies in Rome, where I currently live. In 1993, I took my degree in Sociology at the University “La Sapienza” of Rome, with a thesis on Habermas’ “Theory of Communicative Action,” that in 1994 became, under the title Consenso e razionalità (Armando editore), the first Italian monograph on Habermas’ book. In 1998, I took a Doctorate in Political Sociology, University of Florence. I was based first at the University of Perugia and then at the University of Salerno, until 2008. Currently, I am Associate Professor at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, where I teach Sociology. I serve as editorial consultant on the board of a number of journals, including Quaderni di Teoria Sociale, Cosmopolis and Politica e Società. In English I published articles on Durkheim and contemporary social theory in The Journal of Classical Sociology, Durkheimian Studies, and Philosophy and Social Criticism. I have been visiting scholar and academic visitor in different institutions, including the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, Oxford University, the Centre for Cultural Sociology, Yale University, and the Department of Religious Studies, Brown University, where I lectured on different occasions. Since 1991, I am a member of the Italian ‘Seminario permanente di Teoria Critica’. Currently I am the Director of the CSPS (Centre for the Study and Documentation of Religions and Political Institution in Post-Secular Society).

Topics of Research

Suffering and EvilMy research interests are mainly within the Durkheimian tradition of thought, on the one hand, and that of critical theory, on the other. I try to work on two different but strictly related and intercommunicating levels, an historical and a theoretical level. On the historical level, I edited the new Italian edition of Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Meltemi 2005), writing a new Introduction, and with William S.F. Pickering I co-edited the volume Suffering and Evil. The Durkheimian Legacy (Berghahn Books, Oxford-New York, 2008), approaching the topic of evil from within the Durkheimian tradition; I published several articles on Durkheim in Italian and international journals. On the theoretical level, the attention paid to the new interpretations of Durkheim’s work gave birth to the volume (co-edited with Ambrogio Santambrogio) titled Émile Durkheim. Letture contemporanee (Meltemi, Roma, 2002). But more than this, I developed a research program on the place of ritual and the sacred in contemporary life, that tries to approach issues related to the place of religions in the public sphere, theories of secularization and the idea of the post-secular from this angle. The first step of this broad theoretical project was the 2002 volume titled Solidarietà e sacro. Secolarizzazione e persistenza della religione nel discorso sociologico della modernità (Laterza), and the most recent one is the volume titled Ritual and the Sacred (Ashgate 2009). On the historical level, the next research project involves the analysis of modernity, and the relation between religions and modernity, in some prominent Durkheimian figures - such as Marcel Mauss, Maurice Halbwachs and Robert Hertz –, whereas on the theoretical level the ongoing project is tentatively titled Multiple Modernities & Multiple Secularisms: Turkey and Europe from a Secular to a Post-Secular Age. A constant attention is paid to the issues of critical theory within the tradition of the Frankfurt school, from Horkheimer to Jürgen Habermas, particularly in relation to the topic of religion (Consenso e razionalità. Riflessioni su teoria dell’agire comunicativo, Armando, Roma, 1994; Ragionevoli dubbi. La critica sociale tra universalismo e scepsi, co-edito con P. Costa e I. Testa, Carocci, Roma, 2001).

Main Publications