George Steinmetz is professor of sociology and German studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Regulating the Social: The Welfare State and Local Politics in Imperial Germany (1993) and The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (forthcoming). He is the editor of The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and Its Epistemological Others (2005). He has codirected (with Michael Chanan) the documentary film Detroit: Ruin of a City (2005).