Tom R. Burns

Tom R. Burns (born 1937) is an American/Swedish sociologist, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Uppsala in Sweden and founder of the Uppsala Theory Circle.

He grew up in Arkansas, and was in a Franciscan Monastery for a number of years. As a teenager, he attended Phillips Academy Andover in Massachusetts, before going to Stanford University to study physics and mathematics, where he obtained his BS in physics in 1959. In the years 1959–60 he studied physics and sociology for almost two years at the University of Warsaw, Poland as an exchange student from Stanford. He returned to Stanford, where he obtained his MA in sociology in 1962 and his PhD in Sociology in 1969.

He started his academic career as Assistant Professor at the George Washington University, and moved to the University of New Hampshire in 1968, where he became Associate Professor in 1973. From 1976 to 1983 he was senior researcher at the Scandinavian Institutes for Administrative Research. In this period he also was Professor at the in Sweden from 1978 to 1980, Professor at the University of Oslo in Norway from 1979 to 1982.

In 1982 he was appointed the position of Professor of Sociology at the University of Uppsala, which he held until 2002 after which he became Emeritus Professor. Back in the United States he was also Clarence J. Robinson University Professor at the George Mason University from 1987 to 1990. From 2003 to 2006 he was NORFA Professor at the Centre for International Environment and Development Studies Nof theorwegian University of Life Sciences. He was Visiting professor at the Lisbon University Institute (ISCTE), in Portugal from 2007 to 2013.

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