In July 2009, the American Journal of Sociology (AJS) began publishing book reviews by an individual writing as Barbara Celarent, professor of particularity at the University of Atlantis. Mysterious in origin, Celarent’s essays taken together provide a broad introduction to social thinking. Through the close reading of important texts, Celarent’s short, informative, and analytic essays engaged with long traditions of social thought across the globe—from India, Brazil, and China to South Africa, Turkey, and Peru. . . and occasionally the United States and Europe.

Sociologist and AJS editor Andrew Abbott edited the Celarent essays, and in Varieties of Social Imagination, he brings the work together for the first time. Previously available only in the journal, the thirty-six meditations found here allow readers not only to engage more deeply with a diversity of thinkers from the past, but to imagine more fully a sociology—and a broader social science—for the future.

“Like Rómulo Gallegos’s Doña Barbara, Doña Barbara Celarent comes ‘de más lejos que más nunca’ to reconstitute social thought to its integrity. Her recovery and analysis of odd or forgotten clairvoyant English-speaking social scholars, or her going beyond the ‘English only’ comfort zone, introducing thought-provoking Nairobi, Mexican, Brazilian, Chinese or Peruvian thinkers, reveal the often-missed blend of echoes and voices that deciphering human societies has necessarily encompassed. Varieties of Social Imagination is an enchanting reading that reinstalls the meaning of erudition that the true sociological imagination demands.”

-- Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, University of Chicago

“Varieties of Social Imagination is a beautiful book—deeply learned, deeply original, and deeply humane. If the ‘roots of humane social science,’ as the wise Barbara Celarent suggests, ‘lie in translation, in making the systematic leap from one social standpoint to another,’ then this book is both a compelling exercise in translation and a distinctive contribution to a humane social science.”

-- Rogers Brubaker, University of California, Los Angeles

“A social scientist of outstanding culture, Abbott takes us in his reading room to revive a wonderful diverse set of authors and works, mostly non-Westerners. The reward is twofold. First, the selection paves the way for a global history of social thought. And second, Abbott’s masterful art of reading proves itself to be a heuristic that makes for better conversation between scholarship and imagination.”

-- Pierre-Michel Menger, Collège de France (Paris)

Barbara Celarent is a courtesy name for an aspect of universality that sometimes took particular form in the period 2009-2015. She was interested in encountering and comprehending the phenomena of particularity and difference."Barbara Celarent" was simply the name given to the minimal definition and constancy thereby achieved. During her particular sojourn, Celarent was Professor of the Sociology of Particularity at the University of Atlantis. In late 2015 (or 2053 possibly) she returned to universality.