Simeon J. Newman
Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology
Simeon J. Newman is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology. He is a political and comparative-historical sociologist with broad interests in social theory, political economy and the philosophy of the social sciences.
Newman’s research is an effort to revise political domination theories due to a keen sensitivity to change over time. Newman addresses questions of social processes and historical methodologies in his conceptual and epistemic work and examines specific forms of authority and autonomization in his empirical work.
In Newman’s book project, he shows that the unprecedented wave of urban population growth and the proliferation of squatter settlements in twentieth-century Mexico City shaped politics in a non-linear pattern, initially helping to bolster the Institutional Revolutionary Party (which ruled the country for decades) and then helping to undermine it.
Newman received his PhD in 2023 and his master’s degree in 2014 from the University of Michigan. He earned his dual bachelor of arts degree in sociology and history from the University of California, Berkeley in 2011. Prior to joining the University of Toronto, Newman was a postdoctoral fellow at the Max-Weber-Institut für Soziologie at the Universität Heidelberg.