Prof. Bernardo Zacka

Bernardo Zacka is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science. He is a political theorist with an interest in ethnographic methods. His research focuses on how the state is experienced by those who interact with it and those who act in its name. His first book, “When the State Meets the Street (Harvard University Press, 2017),” probes the everyday moral life of street-level bureaucrats. His second book project, “Institutional Atmospherics,” looks at several episodes in the 20th century when welfare agencies turned to architecture and interior design to try to repair their relationship to citizens, and recovers from that history a more ambitious conception of what an interface between state and society can and should do. He received his PhD from the Department of Government at Harvard University. He has been a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin and is currently on sabbatical at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.