The place of European studies in the landscape of North American social sciences has faced serious challenges since the seventies (Lamont 2013). The general decline of area studies after the transition away from a colonial, and then Cold War-inspired, geographical organization of knowledge production has meant a redefinition of the position of European studies within the social sciences field over the past several decades. This trend has materialized in a highly regrettable decline in funding from some of the main American supporters of independent social science research on Europe, most notably the Ford Foundation and the German Marshall Fund (both following earlier signals from the Mellon Foundation).

Concomitantly, the Global South has come to exercise a growing and powerful attraction on our undergraduates, due to shifts in what it means to be progressive for today's young, the intensification of globalization, and the booming economic and political importance of countries like Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS). This trend is affecting academic hiring patterns, including the turn of history departments toward global history and the accelerated hiring of experts in areas other than Europe. Although itself a positive change, such a disciplinary shift is not without consequence for European studies.

Similar transformations operate in other disciplines (Lamont 2009). To simplify greatly, within political science, an American politics-based methodological push which went hand in hand with the adoption of economics as a reference point has transformed and challenged European comparative politics, a field with a long lineage of Weberian-inspired qualitative analysis. For its part, US-based anthropology of Europe prospered for a while, albeit just when the discipline itself went into a state of decline. At the same time, macroeconomics continued to veer away from country-based analyses, to focus more exclusively on theoretical innovation and modeling. As for sociology, research endeavors in my field were never firmly grounded in geographic divisions, and very few of my contemporaries have developed intellectual identities as proper “Europeanists”. Instead, while a number of sociologists are serious regional experts, it is not unusual that members of my tribe take on regional topics in a more superficial fashion: they aim to make theoretical or substantive contributions by drawing on evidence that “happened” to be gathered in Europe.