Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Bangor University, Wales. He studied at Hamburg University, Germany, and at the Universities of Greenwich and Middlesex (both London). He has held an ESRC postdoctoral fellowship at Goldsmiths College (University of London) and a Simon Fellowship at the University of Manchester. He works on social and political theory, intellectual history and historical sociology, and has lately concentrated on various aspects of modern antisemitism, especially its interconnections with liberalism and nationalism and the emergence of the discipline of sociology.