ICREA Research Professor in the Department of Sociological Theory, Philosophy of Law and Methodology of the Social Sciences at the University of Barcelona. His research interests are in social and political theory and in historical, political and cultural sociology with a particular emphasis on the comparative analysis of contemporary social configurations and their historical trajectories. Since 2010 he is the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council-funded Advanced Grant project “Trajectories of modernity: comparing non-European and European varieties”. His recent book publications include: Modernity: Understanding the Present (Cambridge: Polity, 2012) and Modernity as Experience and Interpretation. A New Sociology of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2008) as well as the co-edited volumes The Greek polis and the Invention of Democracy: a Politico-cultural Transformation and its Interpretations (with Johann Arnason and Kurt Raaflaub, Oxford: Blackwell, forthcoming) and Varieties of World-Making: Beyond Globalization (with Nathalie Karagiannis, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007). www.ub.edu/tramod