Department of Sociology

David Zaret received a D.Phil. from Oxford University, where he was supervised by Christopher Hill and Steven Lukes. At IU, he has had faculty appointments in sociology and history. From 2011 to 2018, he was IU’s Vice President for International Affairs.

His current research project is a comparative/historical analysis of petitioning in pre-modern states across Eurasia. With the title Petitioning and Power Relations in Premodern Eurasia, Oxford University Press is publishing this work in the Past & Present Book Series. Prior publications from this research include “Petition-and-Response and Liminal Petitioning in Comparative/Historical Perspective,” Social Science History 43:3 (2019), and “What is a Petition?” in Richard Huzzey et. al., eds., Petitions and Petitioning from the Medieval Period to the Present (Oxford University Press, 2024, for the Proceedings of the British Academy series). For an amusing intensive case study of petitioning, see “Fabricating Opinion: The Duke of Northumberland’s Subscription Campaign for Petitions to Parliament against the 1831 Reform Bill,” Parliaments, Estates and Representation 42:2 (2022).

Before the comparative project, Zaret explored connections between early modern British petitioning and the rise of a public sphere, notably in Origins of Democratic Culture (Princeton University Press, 2000), and also "Petitions and the Invention of Public Opinion in the English Revolution," American Journal of Sociology (1996), which won the 1997 Barrington Moore Award from the ASA, and “Petitioning Places and the Credibility of Opinion in the Public Sphere in 17^th-Century England.” in Beat Kümin, ed., Political Space in Pre-Industrial Europe (London, 2009).

His earlier work on religion, politics and social change in early-modern England includes The Heavenly Contract: Ideology and Organization in Pre-Revolutionary Puritanism (University of Chicago Press, 1986), "Religion and the Rise of Liberal Democratic Ideology in 17th-Century England," American Sociological Review 54:2 (1989), and "Tradition, Human Rights, and the English Revolution," in Human Rights and Revolutionary Traditions, edited by Jeff Wasserstrom and Lynn Hunt (NY 2000).