Julia Adams

Julia Potter Adams (born July 11, 1957) is an American sociologist who works in the area of comparative and historical sociology. Julia Adams is a professor of Sociology. She conducts research in the areas of state building, gender and family, social theory and knowledge, early modern European politics, and Colonialism and empire. Her current research focuses on the historical sociology of agency relations and modernity, gender, race, and the representation of academic knowledge on Wikipedia and on other digital platforms. Adams is Professor of Sociology and International & Area Studies and Head of Grace Hopper College, Yale. She also co-directs YaleCHESS (Center for Historical Enquiry and the Social Sciences) and is on the Board of Reed College. She was later promoted to become an associate professor. She moved to Yale University in 2004.

She was president of the Social Science History Association (SSHA) from 2008 to 2009. Her presidential address covered historical sociological topics including agency, labor, and principal-agent relations. From 2010 to 2013, she served as Joseph C. Fox Fellowship Director at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies (Yale).

Adams received a National Science Foundation grant in 2013 to conduct a study of the relationship between gender bias and the portrayal of academics in Wikipedia She collaborated with Hannah Bruckner of New York University-Abu Dhabi. Some of the resulting work has been published in peer-reviewed articles. This research was the background for the development of her book, The Familial State, which focuses on elite families in large scale political development in European countries. By studying Holland's renowned families, who were both state-builders and merchant capitalists during the seventeenth century Dutch Golden Age, Adams discovered how the family patriarchs shaped the first great wave of European colonialism which led to the widespread influence of European political development in the modern world.

Adams has conducted research regarding Wikipedia with Hannah Brückner who is a professor of Social Research and Public Policy at New York University-Abu Dhabi and is a leading sociologist on life course, inequality, health, gender and sexuality. This research project titled, "Wikipedia and the Democratization of Academic Knowledge" is a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded study of how academics and academic subjects are represented on Wikipedia. The research gathered by Adams and Brückner is focused on comparing the structure and statistics of scientific evidence and social scientific evidence with their Wikipedia entries to better understand the development of Wikipedia as a functional and legitimate online encyclopedia.