Gil Eyal

Gil Eyal

Professor, Department of Sociology, Columbia University

Gil Eyal is the director of the Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture Project. He is a Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. Gil Eyal's work deals with sociology of expertise, intellectuals and knowledge, in particular as it relates to broader political processes and to the interstitial spaces between fields. In two early books he has dealt with the transition from socialism to capitalism in Eastern Europe, and the role played by intellectuals, technocrats and in particular economists in the process. (With Ivan Szelenyi and Eleanor Townsley) Making Capitalism without Capitalists. (London: Verso, 1998); The Origins of Post-Communist Elites: From the Prague Spring to the Breakup of Czechoslovakia. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). A later book dealt with expertise about Arab affairs and the role it plays in Israeli society, government and the military: The Disenchantment of the Orient. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). His latest book provides a sociological explanation for the current autism epidemic, and traces the blurring of boundaries between experts and laypeople that play a role in the dynamics leading to the epidemic. (With Brendan Hart, Emine Onculer, Neta Oren and Natasha Rossi) The Autism Matrix: The Social Origins of the Autism Epidemic. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010). The approach applied in this book is developed further in his recent article: "For a Sociology of Expertise: The Social Origins of the Autism Epidemic,” AJS Vol. 118, No. 4 (January 2013), pp. 863-907.

Working Group Affiliation

Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture, Project Director