Júlia Sonnevend is Associate Professor of Sociology and Communications at The New School for Social Research. She is a sociologist of global culture, focusing on the events icons, symbols and charismatic personalities of public life and media. Her comparative and interdisciplinary publications argue that much of global culture rests on the unexpected, not on the planned.
Her new book, Charm: How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics is forthcoming with Princeton University Press in August 2024. In this book, Sonnevend argues that politics is a site of performance, and contemporary politicians often perform the role of a regular person—perhaps someone we would like to have a beer with.
Her first, award-winning book, Stories Without Borders: The Berlin Wall and the Making of a Global Iconic Event (Oxford University Press, 2016) raised the question: How we can tell the story of an event in a way that people would remember it internationally and over time? In this book, Sonnevend developed a new concept of “global iconic events”, defined as news events that the international media cover extensively and remember ritually
Sonnevend received her PhD in Communications from Columbia University, her Master of Laws degree from Yale Law School, and her Juris Doctorate and Master of Arts degrees in German Studies and Aesthetics from Eötvös Loránd University Budapest.