Research Portal

Dr Marcel Stoetzler

Senior Lecturer in Sociology

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ORCID: 0000-0001-5850-5114

Overview

Marcel Stoetzler is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. He has held an ESRC postdoctoral fellowship at Goldsmiths College (University of London) and a Simon Fellowship at the University of Manchester. He studied at Hamburg University, Germany, and the Universities of Greenwich and Middlesex (both London). His training is in history, literature, linguistics, media and cultural studies, and gender and ethnic studies. His first book, The State, the Nation and the Jews, Liberalism and the Antisemitism Dispute in Bismarck’s Germany, was published in 2008 by the University of Nebraska Press and is based on a combination of historical sociology and social theory. He has published an edited volume on Antisemitism and the Constitution of Sociology, also with the University of Nebraska Press, in 2014. His book Beginning Classical Social Theory has been published with Manchester University Press in 2017. His latest book is the edited volume Critical Theory and the Critique of Antisemitism, Bloomsbury 2023.

Links to video recordings of talks:

 Marcel Stoetzler has given talks amongst others at

  • Bucerius Institute for Research of German Contemporary History and Society, University of Haifa;
  • Center for European Studies, New York University;
  • Center of Contemporary Art, Tblisi;
  • Centre for German-Jewish Studies, Sussex University;
  • Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Graz;
  • C-REX Centre for Research on Extremism, University of Oslo;
  • Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, University College London;
  • Bruxelles Free University;
  • Gyeongsang National University, Jinju;
  • HL-S Center for Studies of the Holocaust and Religious Minorities, Oslo;
  • Institute of Advanced Study, Warwick University;
  • Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades at the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico;
  • Maumaus School for Visual Arts, Lisbon;
  • Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University;
  • Social Theory Seminar, University of Chicago;
  • Social Theory Workshop, Sussex University;
  • Sogang University, Seoul;
  • Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung, Technical University of Berlin;
  • ZKM Zentrum für Kommunikation und Medien, Karlsruhe.

Research

Marcel Stoetzler works on general social theory, especially Critical Theory and feminist theory, and more specifically, on racism and antisemitism in their relationships to modernity, liberalism and nationalism. He serves on the editorial board of Patterns of Prejudice and is a fellow at the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Manchester and an associate at the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, Birkbeck College, London.

His current research has two points of focus: one, the history of antisemitism, in particular the antisemitic idea that destruction of ‘the Jews’ can bring about a well-calibrated, productive and non-antagonistic form of modernity, and its contradictory relations to the principal modern ideologies liberalism, socialism, conservatism, and in particular the ‘Conservative Revolution’ of the post-WW1 period; two, the history of attempts in the areas of political and social theory to understand and challenge antisemitism, in particular those of the ‘Frankfurt School’ of Critical Theory. In the latter he is chiefly interested in what the Frankfurt theorists call theory’s Zeitkern, i.e. its historical relativity and the role of history in theory.

Formulated late in the nineteenth century, antisemitism has been one of the formative political ideas of twentieth-century European history, and seems currently to be gaining strength again. It articulates concerns with society, culture and economy, including with the supposed moral economies of particular racialised groups, ‘the Jews’ as opposed to others, as the case may be, e.g. ‘the Germans’. Its extreme, eliminatory form that drove the Holocaust must be understood both, as a continuation of its various non-eliminatory forms and as uniquely and radically different from them. This is one of the force fields of the study of antisemitism in relation to the Holocaust.

In a second strand of his work, Stoetzler analyses the work of theorists such as Arendt, Horkheimer and Adorno whose writings are a resource for theorising antisemitism, ‘totalitarianism’, genocides and the Holocaust in particular. Currently he works on a monograph on Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, the first outlines of the argument of which are sketched out in this article.     

Principal publications by research areas (hyperlinks are inserted wherever available):

On general social theory:

On the history and theory of antisemitism:

On Critical Theory:

  • ‘Doing the Locomotive: on Running towards Disaster, Being the Disaster and some bad Screams in John Holloway's Contribution to Open Marxism 4’, in: García Vela, Alfonso; Alberto Bonnet (eds.), 2023, The Political Thought of John Holloway. Struggle, Critique, Emancipation, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 189-208.
  • ‘El tren: correr hacia el desastre, ser el desastre y algunos gritos desafortunados en la teoría de John Holloway’, forthcoming in: García Vela, Alfonso; Alberto Bonnet (eds.) (2023), Revolución, crítica y emancipación. Debates sobre el pensamiento político de John Holloway, Libros Benemerita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla
  • ‘Non-identity, critique of labour and pseudo-praxis: extra-marginal palinlegomena on the dialectics of doing’, in: Bonefeld, Werner and Chris O'Kane, eds., 2022. Adorno and Marx: Negative Dialectics and the Critique of Political Economy, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 205-222.
  • ‘For a dialectical concept of culture’, in Cured Quail vol. 2, 2020, p. 8-22.

On feminist theory:

Teaching and Supervision

Marcel Stoetzler teaches

  • the second year module ‘Classical Social Theory’ (SXS-2035),
  • the third year module ‘Theorizing Society and Politics' (SXS-3003),
  • the MA module ‘Theorizing Society and Politics' (SXS-4070), and
  • the MA modules 'Antisemitism and the Holocaust' (HPS-4002) and 'Time, Space, Modernity' (HPS-4015) [these two modules are not on offer every term - please check Gazettes]. 

He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. 

He was the principal supervisor of Barbara Neukirchinger’s doctorate on ‘The possibilities of combining intersectionality theory and critical theory in disability studies’ (awarded in 2023).

He is the principal supervisor of Lu He's doctorate on multicultural educational policy in North-West China, Ella Palmer's doctorate on the use of cadavers in medical training, Sudeshika Wathtuwa Durayalage's doctorate on education and development in Sri Lanka, and co-supervisor of Marco Castelli's doctorate on 'finanzcapitalismo'. 

He has been co-supervisor of the following:

  • Anna-Katharina Luepke’s doctorate on ‘An international history of the Biafran War’ (awarded in 2018; the main supervisor was in the department of History);
  • Louise Prendergast’s doctorate on ‘Labour market transitions of young people: understanding perceptions, practice and experiences with reference to Foucault’ (awarded in 2018);
  • H. M. Khalil’s doctorate on ‘The political sociology of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq’ (awarded 2018);
  • S. Rafieian Koupaei’s doctorate on ‘Dissociation, unconscious and social theory: towards an embodied relational sociology’ (awarded 2015);
  • Paula Pustulka’s doctorate on ‘Polish mothers on the move: gendering migratory experiences of Polish women parenting in Germany and the United Kingdom’ (awarded 2014).

He contributes to the team-taught Undergraduate Dissertation module and the Foundation degree module Debating the disciplines.

He is a peer reviewer for a wide range of academic journals, including Patterns of Prejudice, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Current Sociology, Feminist Theory, European Journal of Political Theory, the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book and European Societies.

In 2013 he examined a Ph.D. on the history of antisemitism in Greece for Kings College, London (Centre for Hellenic Studies). In 2015 he has been internal examiner at Bangor for two PhDs.

Other

Marcel Stoetzler is a member of the Northern UK Jewish Studies Partnership and an associate of the Antisemitism at Work network, Wirtschaftsuniversität Vienna and Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for Jewish Studies, The University of Manchester.

He is a member of the academic advisory board for the book series Critical Theory and the Critique of Society, Bloomsbury publishers.

February-August 2017: Marcel Stoetzler was a visiting research fellow at the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism at Birkbeck College, London, now called the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism.

July 5, 2016: He organized the workshop ‘Antisemitism and the Constitution of Sociology’ at the Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung, Technical University of Berlin.

May 16, 2013: He organized the Higher Education Academy workshop on ‘Letting the Students Be, Responsibly: Learning, Experience and Standardisation in Higher Education’ at Bangor University, School of Social Science

June 28-29, 2012: He co-organised the international conference ‘Intersectionality and the Spaces of Belonging’, Bangor University, UK [http://berg.bangor.ac.uk/index.php.en?menu=0&catid=0]

November 2-3, 2008: He organised the international conference ‘Antisemitism and the Emergence of Sociological Theory’; conference website: http://www.arts.manchester.ac.uk/subjectareas/religionstheology/anti/

October 5, 2007: He co-organized with Christine Achinger a double panel on ‘Liberalism, Nationalism, and Antisemitism’ at the annual conference of the German Studies Association GSA in San Diego

February 11, 2005: He organised (with Prof. Vic Seidler) the day conference ‘Masks of Antisemitism’ at Goldsmiths College, University of London

July 7-8, 1999: He organised (with Prof. Yuval-Davis) the Interim Conference of the International Sociological Association, Research Council 05 on Race, Ethnic and Minority Relations at the universities of Tel Aviv and East Jerusalem

Research areas and keywords

Keywords

  • HM Sociology
  • HT Communities. Classes. Races
  • HX Socialism. Communism. Anarchism
  • JC Political theory
  • DD Germany

Research outputs (70)

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