Professor Monika Krause

Monika Krause studied sociology and political science at the University of Munich, Cambridge, and LSE. Her PhD in Sociology is from New York University.

Her work has contributed to our understanding of transnational forms of governance and to the study of the social organisation of knowledge and expertise. She has also contributed to sociological theory and to the methodology of the social sciences.

Her current work addresses varied and emerging forms and understandings of the international, contested expertise about atrocities, and questions in the sociology of the social sciences.

Monika is one of the Editors of the European Journal of Sociology.

Before joining LSE, Monika taught at the University of Kent and at Goldsmiths College. She was a Junior Fellow at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research at the University of Bielefeld, a Core Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies and a Visiting Professor at the University of Trento and at LIER/ EHESS (Paris). She served as an elected member on the Executive Council of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE), as an elected council member of the Theory Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA), the Culture Section of the ASA, and the Section on Human Rights of the ASA. She served as the Chair of the Culture Section of the American Sociological Association in 2022-2023.

She is the recipient of the 2019 Lewis A. Coser Award for Theoretical Agenda Setting in Sociology.

Key expertise: Knowledge, Expertise, Social Theory, Culture, Human Rights, Humanitarianism, International Political Sociology

Monika Krause's research addresses comparative questions about forms of expertise, professions, organisations and fields of practice.

Her book Model Cases. On Canonical Research Objects and Sites (Chicago University Press 2021) asks about the concrete material research objects behind shared conversations about classes of objects, periods and regions in the social sciences and humanities.

In The Good Project. Humanitarian NGOs and the Fragmentation of Reason (Chicago University Press 2014) she examined the shared space of humanitarian relief NGOs.

She has also written on journalists, playwrights, psychoanalysts, conservation NGOs, and human rights NGOs. Her theoretical work develops concepts for sociological analysis and seeks to apply insights from a sociology of the social sciences to sociological practice.

Monika is part of the Politics and Human Rights research cluster.

Monika convenes courses on Key Concepts: Advanced Social Theory, Seeing like an NGO: Human Rights in Practice, Classical Social Thought and Modern Social Thought.