About

Charles Kurzman is the Philip Stadter Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His areas of interest include Political Sociology, Social Movements, Middle East and Islamic studies. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1992. His work focuses on understanding social and political dynamics, particularly in relation to social movements and the Middle East. As a faculty member, he contributes to the department through teaching, research, and service, supporting the academic community at UNC.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Law
• Sociology
• History
• Geography
• Political economy
• Philosophy
• Ancient history
• Archaeology
• Economic history
• Economic geography
• Economics

Selected publications

• The Self-Orientalizing Republic of Iran

  UNC Libraries · 2025-01-29

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  On September 13, 2022, a young Kurdish Iranian woman named Mahsa Amini, known to her family as Jina, entered a police station in Tehran, under detention for not sufficiently covering her hair with a headscarf. Within hours, Amini was transferred from the police station to a nearby hospital in a coma. At the hospital, her family told journalists that she had been beaten by law enforcement officers. When Amini died on September 16, 2022, demonstrators gathered outside the hospital demanding an inquiry into Amini’s death. Over the next several days, protests multiplied across Iran demanding more freedoms for women, including the right to show their hair in public, and more freedoms for all Iranians, including democratic reforms and the removal of the leader of the Islamic Republic. Suppression of the protests led to the deaths of more than five hundred protestors and the arrest of tens of thousands (UN HRC 2024, 4–6).

  PublisherDOI

• Women’s Assessments of Gender Equality

  UNC Libraries · 2025-08-06

  articleOpen access

  Women's assessments of gender equality do not consistently match global indices of gender inequality. In surveys covering 150 countries, women in societies rated gender-unequal according to global metrics such as education, health, labor-force participation, and political representation did not consistently assess their lives as less in their control or less satisfying than men did. Women in these societies were as likely as women in index-equal societies to say they had equal rights with men. Their attitudes toward gender issues did not reflect the same latent construct as in index-equal societies, although attitudes may have begun to converge in recent years. These findings reflect a longstanding tension between universal criteria of gender equality and an emphasis on subjective understandings of women's priorities.

  PublisherDOI

• The Cold War against the Cold War

  Social Science History · 2024-10-04

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The strange career of Millian methods in comparative social science

  Social Forces · 2024-07-05

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract For half a century, comparative social science has been closely associated with John Stuart Mill’s methods of comparison. However, few social scientists had heard of Mill’s methods in 1970. Within a decade, the methods of agreement and difference had become part of the methodological canon—despite Mill’s objections that these methods should under no circumstances be used in the social sciences. Comparativists continued to overlook the methods that Mill actually proposed for the social sciences, which relied on an analogy with astronomical observations rather than chemistry experiments. Yet Mill’s own empirical research offered substantive findings without dwelling much on methods. Over the past half-century, successful works of comparative social science have pursued all three versions of Millian methods: the comparative methods that he widely associated with; the alternative methods that he proposed for social science; and the actual methods that he pursued, whose success lay in their creativity, not in methodological recipes.

  PublisherDOI

• The Self-Orientalizing Republic of Iran

  Perspectives on Politics · 2024-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  On September 13, 2022, a young Kurdish Iranian woman named Mahsa Amini, known to her family as Jina, entered a police station in Tehran, under detention for not sufficiently covering her hair with a headscarf. Within hours, Amini was transferred from the police station to a nearby hospital in a coma. At the hospital, her family told journalists that she had been beaten by law enforcement officers. When Amini died on September 16, 2022, demonstrators gathered outside the hospital demanding an inquiry into Amini’s death. Over the next several days, protests multiplied across Iran demanding more freedoms for women, including the right to show their hair in public, and more freedoms for all Iranians, including democratic reforms and the removal of the leader of the Islamic Republic. Suppression of the protests led to the deaths of more than five hundred protestors and the arrest of tens of thousands (UN HRC 2024, 4–6).

  PublisherDOI

• Scholarly attention and the limited internationalization of US social science

  UNC Libraries · 2024-02-23

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  What parts of the world does American social science consider worthy of scholarly attention? Analyzing the geographic focus of more than 2 million bibliographic records of journal articles, books, and dissertations, the study finds a weak trend toward internationalization of US social-scientific attention over the past half-century. Moreover, the share of scholarly attention devoted to particular regions has remained surprisingly stable over this period, with Western Europe remaining the primary focus of internationally-oriented work. Shifts in US national security priorities, international trade, student demand, and demographic characteristics account for only a small portion of the variation in the rate of social-scientific publications on world regions, lending credibility to the view that scholarly attention is shaped in large part by inertia that is built into academic institutions and cultures.

  PublisherDOI

• The Globalization of <i>Social Forces</i>

  Social Forces · 2022 · 10 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• When Do Muslims Vote Islamic?

  2022-01-01 · 1 citations

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Revolutionary World

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2021 · 22 citations

  • Political Science
  • History
  • Ancient history

  Throughout the modern age, revolutions have spread across state borders, engulfing entire regions, continents, and, at times, the globe. Revolutionary World examines the spread of upheavals during the major revolutionary moments in modern history: the Atlantic Revolutions, Europe's 1848 revolts, the commune movement of the 1870s, the 1905-15 upheavals in Asia, the communist revolutions around 1917, the 'Wilsonian' uprisings of 1919, the 'Third World' revolutions, the global Islamic revolt of 1978-79, the events of 1989, and the rise and fall of the 'Arab Spring'. The chapters explore the nature of these revolutionary waves, tracing the exchange of radical ideas and the movements of revolutionaries around the world. Bringing together a group of distinguished historians, Revolutionary World shows that the major revolutions of the modern age, which have so often been studied as isolated national or imperial events, were almost never contained within state borders and were usually part of broader revolutionary moments.

  DOI

• Intellectuals and Democratization, 1905–1912 and 1989–1996

  UNC Libraries · 2021-07-02

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This article bridges the gap in studies of the social bases of democratization between qualitative studies focused on social groups and quantitative studies focused on national characteristics. Qualitative historical evidence suggests the importance of classes-in particular, the emerging class of intellectuals-in the wave of democratizations in the decade before World War I. Quantitative cross-national data on a more recent wave of democratizations, from 1989 to 1996, confirm these findings. Models using direct maximum-likelihood estimation find that the ratio of adults with higher education has a significant positive effect on change in democracy levels, as measured by two longitudinal scales (Polity IV and Polyarchy). Proxies for the working class and the middle class-candidates proposed in previous studies as the social basis of democratization-also have significant effects.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Ijlal Naqvi

  29 shared

• Brandon Gorman

  Albany State University

  28 shared

• Alice Burton

  3 shared

• David Motadel

  3 shared

• Leslie Salzinger

  University of California, Berkeley

  3 shared

• Bruce B. Lawrence

  Duke University

  3 shared

• Ebrahim Moosa

  University of Notre Dame

  3 shared

• Josepha Schiffman

  3 shared