Research

Goldberg is a political sociologist who uses comparative and interpretive methods to explore what history and social theory have to say to each other. While his work is rooted in the discipline of sociology, it engages with a wide spectrum of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. His books have examined conflicts over the citizenship rights of public relief recipients during critical junctures in American political development; how and why Jews became a key cultural reference point for defining modernity and national identity in European and American social thought; and the role of the public university in a democratic society. His current research focuses on the history and sociology of antisemitism and the social bases of contemporary populism, especially its right-wing variant in the US.

Goldberg’s research has been generously supported by the Library of Congress and American Historical Association, Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, Advanced Research Collaborative at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg and European Institutes for Advanced Study, Max-Weber-Kolleg für kultur- und sozialwissenschaftliche Studien, and Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.