Claudio Sopranzetti is an Associate Professor in Anthropology at the Central European University. His research interests sit at the nexus of theorizations of capitalism, urbanism, ecological transition, and social movements in Southeast Asia and Southern Europe. Currently, he is conducting a new research project in southern Italy exploring the aftermath of a phytopatological epidemic that killed more than 21 million olive trees.

At the turn of the twenty-first century astronomers made the surprising discovery that our universe is expanding much faster than expected. The source of this mysterious accelerated expansion - sometimes dubbed 'dark energy' - is still unknown. One possible explanation is that our current theory of gravity, Einstein's theory of General Relativity, breaks down on the largest scales in the universe.

My research focuses on alternative theories of gravity. I study these from both a formal (mathematical) perspective and an observational one: such alternative gravities should leave subtle signatures in the evolution and structure of the universe. Are the latest astronomical telescopes and satellite experiments sensitive enough to detect these effects? I am involved with several European space missions which may be able to confirm - or rule out - the need for a new theory of gravity.

My research interests lie in three main fields: employment law, contract and commercial law, and legal theory. In the field of employment law, a current particular interest concerns the application of human rights principles to the workplace and the employment relation. In relation to contract law, the development of European Community contract law has been a particular interest in recent years. In a combination of legal theory and commercial law, another focus of my research is in the idea of networks as a hybrid form of business organisation that is insufficiently recognised and accommodated by the law.'    

My research interests fall broadly within the public international field, including international energy law and international environmental law. I am currently co-investigator in a cross-institutional two year (2012-2014) research project on Climate Geoengineering Governance (CGG) funded by the ESRC and AHRC, led from the Oxford Institute for Science, Innovation and Society.

I write about literature, art, and cultural history for the London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Apollo Magazine and others.

My research spans French, Middle Eastern and global history. I am particularly interested in how people come to know and think about situations far removed from their own. As part of this, I am currently completing a DPhil on the history of international news in colonial Algeria. I have also launched a larger collaborative project on 'The Politics of Colonial Comparison' to understand how colonial empires compared themselves to each other. Beyond modern North Africa and France, I am interested in theories of settler colonialism, and more broadly in the relationship between social segregation and empathy.

I am currently completing two complementary but independent and self-standing books which are contracted to appear with Cambridge University Press.  Both are concerned with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the era of Mao Zedong, both deal with religion, and both combine political with social and cultural history. Both are concerned with what I call ‘supernatural politics’, i.e. those zones where the culture and politics of the CCP interacted, resonated or overlapped with folk religious culture (book 1); or, conversely, where ordinary people used folk belief and ritual to understand and contest the power of the state and, relatedly, sought to expand their power through recourse to non-visible entities (book 2). Both books are based on substantial work in archives in the PRC and on so-called neibu (for internal circulation only) publications -- sources that are now under restricted access. The fundamental aims of the two books, however, are quite distinct. The first, Supernatural Politics: Mao Zedong and the Drive to Eliminate Religion in China, 1949-79, focuses on the ideological and institutional policies of the CCP towards the five religions that it recognized, and towards folk religion, which it did not.  A central concern is to explore what the CCP’s very mixed record in seeking to eliminate religion tells us about the workings of the party-state and the limits of its power. The second volume, Communism in an Enchanted World: Chinese Folk Religion under Mao Zedong, focuses on the many dimensions of folk religion and on the ritual specialists who sustained it, and on the grassroots interventions of the CCP to eliminate what it called ‘feudal superstition’. A central concern is to explore how folk religion survived, despite prolonged ideological and political assault and, relatedly, how it accommodated to, and was shaped by, the prodigious socio-economic and political changes unleashed after 1949, and was poised to make a remarkable comeback after 1980.

I mainly work on the literary, social, and intellectual history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France. My current work is on the early modern relation between literature and learning on the one hand, and social hierarchy on the other. Previous projects on encyclopaedism, curiosity, and posthumous presence investigated how different kinds of knowledge and belief were represented, and in particular how they were shaped by language.

Through the British Academy I am involved in work on language policy within education and society.