Department of Sociology

David Zaret received a D.Phil. from Oxford University and had IU faculty appointments in sociology and history. From 2011 to 2018, he was IU’s Vice President for International Affairs.

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).

More recent work explores links between petitioning and the development of a public sphere. This includes Origins of Democratic Culture (Princeton University Press, 2000), "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, "Religion, Science and Printing in the Public Spheres of 17th-Century England," in Habermas and the Public Sphere, in Craig Calhoun, ed., (MIT Press, 1992), 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: Ashgate, 2009).

His current project explores petitioning and power relations in pre-modern states across Eurasia and includes “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 (forthcoming, Oxford University Press for the British Academy). An amusing side note to this project is an intensive case study, “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).