Simone Polillo is a Ph.D. candidate in the Sociology Department at the University of Pennsylvania. He obtained an International Baccalaureate from the United World College of the Atlantic (UK), a B.A. in economics and social theory from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, and expects his doctorate from Penn in August 2008.

His interests include economic and political sociology, social theory, world-system theory and comparative historical sociology, and the sociology of the self. His research on the international diffusion of central banking practices was published in the American Journal of Sociology in 2005 in a paper titled “Globalization Pressures and the State: The Worldwide Diffusion of Central Bank Independence,” coauthored with Prof. Mauro Guillén. His dissertation work investigates the social nature of banking and its relationship with state-building and elite power in a comparative historical perspective, using the United States and Italy between the 1850s and 1910s as its main cases. By building on the Weberian tradition of state-centered historical sociology, power elite theorists such as C.W. Mills and Bill Domhoff, the relational sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and the political sociology of Joseph Schumpeter, the main argument is that the fiscal structure of the state affects the extent to which fiscally conservative traditions establish themselves and develop over time.

His second main line of work involves the elaboration of a neo-pragmatist theory of the self which incorporates network theory with the “temporal” embeddedness of the self in social identities: he is currently expanding a paper titled “The Network-Structure of the Self” which in 2005 received the best graduate student paper award by the Sociology of Emotions section of the ASA.

Undergraduate Level SOC 454 - Political Sociology

Graduate Level