Harvard Sociology Professor Michele Lamont
speaks on
"Comparing French and American Cultures Across Class and Racial Boundaries"
DATE: Wednesday, March 30, 2011
TIME: 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
MORE INFO:
MICHÈLE LAMONT is Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies and Professor of Sociology and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and is co-director of its research program on Successful Societies.Lamont’s scholarly interests center on shared concepts of worth and excellence, and their impact on hierarchies in a number of social domains. She has written on how the meanings given to worth (including moral worth) to ethno-racial and class inequality, on the definitions and determinants of societal excellence, and on the evaluation of excellence in higher education. Recent areas of interest include group boundaries, racism and anti-racism (how members of stigmatized groups respond to racism and discrimination), how culture matters for poverty, shared criteria of evaluation for qualitative social sciences, disciplinary cultures, and interdisciplinarity . A former Guggenheim fellow, her research has been supported by the Center for Advanced Research in the Behavioral Sciences, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the Institute for Advanced Studies, the Lilly Endowment, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She has also received numerous grants from the National Science Foundation. She serves on the editorial boards of a number of journals and the advisory boards in Europe, Canada, and the United States. She also served as chair of the Council for European Studies from 2006 to 2009. In 2010 she was appoited to the Haut Conseil de la Science and Technologie, which helps the French government develop policies in the areas of higher education, research, and science and technology. She also serves on a number of scientific and advisory boards in the United States and Europe.
Born in Toronto in 1957, Lamont received a B.A. (1978) and a Masters (1979) in political theory at Ottawa University, before pursuing her doctoral research in sociology at the Université de Paris, where she graduated in 1983. She held a post-doctoral fellowship at Stanford University (1983-1985) and took her first position at the University of Texas at Austin (1985-1987). Appointed Assistant Professor of Sociology at Princeton University in 1987, she was promoted to tenure in 1993 and to the rank of full professor in 2000. She moved to Harvard University in 2003 and was appointed Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies in 2006.
In 2009 and 2010, she served as Senior Advisor to Faculty Development and Diversity in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She launched a mentoring program for FAS tenure-track faculty and took various measures to help FAS diversify its faculty. For more information, see the FAS Faculty Development and Diversity website.
