Eric Slater, Ph.D.

Associate Professor

My areas of interest include: Urban Studies, World-Systems, Historical Sociology, Social Movements, and Quantitative Methods.

I did my graduate work in the Sociology Department at SUNY Binghamton, richly populated with characters from around the world. While at Binghamton, I was a member of the World Hegemonies Research Working Group at the Fernand Braudel Center under the direction of Giovanni Arrighi, which produced Chaos and Governance (1999; trans.: Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese, Italian). The book is a comparative study of hegemonic transitions, historical periods in which one great power rises and another declines. My contribution dealt with social movements; in particular, the impact of labor and national liberation movements on the rise of American power.

More recently I finished an article that draws on aspects of the hegemonic transitions framework to re-examine the nature of the contemporary global city, using maps to represent concentrations of economic and social power in select world cities; it has been published in the Journal of World-Systems Research. Another article that has been submitted is a study of Caffa, the leading Genoese colony in the late-medieval period. The article reconstructs the world-historical context of Caffa's formation, expansion, and eventual dissolution in order to engage issues pertaining to the boundaries of modern social change. It has been submitted for publication in Review. At present I am at work on a study of the shantytown as one of the more salient features of globalization.