Harry F. Dahms is Professor of Sociology and co-chair of the Committee on Social Theory at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK). He directs the Center for Social Theory and serves as a member of the AI TENNessee Initiative and the Center for the Dynamics of Social Complexity (DySoc). In addition, he is core faculty in Cinema Studies at UTK and editor of Current Perspectives in Social Theory.
Dahms’ research and teaching span theoretical sociology, critical and social theory, planetary sociology, globalization, political economy, social inequality, the sociology of film (with a focus on science fiction), artificial intelligence, and social justice. His work explores the tensions and contradictions of modern society, examining the interplay between economic change, politics, culture, and social structures. Drawing on the insights of Karl Marx, Max Weber, and the Frankfurt School theorists, Dahms situates contemporary social paradoxes at the intersection of globalization and planetary sociology, analyzing how identity and broader social structures interact.
He has served as associate editor of Basic Income Studies and Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and he was a founding member of the editorial boards of The Newfound Press (University of Tennessee Libraries) and Anthem Studies in the Political Sociology of Democracy. Since 2022, Dahms has been a member of the AI Tennessee Initiative task force.
His theoretical work is informed by a wide range of thinkers, including Theodor W. Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, Joseph Schumpeter, Hegel, Talcott Parsons, Darko Suvin, Moishe Postone, and Amy Allen. Dahms emphasizes the frictions inherent in modern social order, exploring how contradictions are both normalized and contained within mechanisms of social stability, and how these processes challenge conventional categories of social scientific analysis.
Selected Publications:
- Social Theory’s Burden: From Heteronomy to Vitacide in Society in Flux: Two Centuries of Social Theory(Emerald, 2022)
- “Critical Theory, Sociology, and Science-Fiction Films” in Capital in the Mirror: Critical Social Theory and the Aesthetic Dimension(SUNY Press, 2020)
- “Adorno’s Critique of the New Right-Wing Extremism,” disClosure: a journal of social theory, 29(1), 129–179
- Ecologically Unequal Exchange: Environmental Injustice in Comparative and Historical Perspective, co-edited with R. Scott Frey and Paul K. Gellert (Palgrave, 2019)
- The Vitality of Critical Theory(Emerald, 2011)
- Nature, Knowledge, and Negation(ed., Emerald, 2009)
- No Social Science Without Critical Theory(ed., Emerald, 2008)
- Globalization Between the Cold War and Neo-Imperialism(Special Volume Editor, Elsevier/JAI, 2006)
- Transformations of Capitalism: Economy, Society and the State in Modern Times(Editor, Palgrave/NYU Press, 2000)
