Research Interests

Recent and Forthcoming Papers

Selected Abstracts

On-line Curriculum Vitae

On-line Curriculum Vitae, pdf format

Teaching

Michèle Lamont

Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies and
Professor of Sociology and African and African American Studies

Biographical Note

MICHÈLE LAMONT is Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies and Professor of Sociology and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She moved to Harvard in 2003 after having taught at Princeton for 15 years. A former Guggenheim fellow, she is currently serving as Chair of the Council for European Studies, the learned society of American social scientists and historians working on Europe. She is a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and is co-director of its research program on Successful Societies.

Professor Lamont has published in the fields of inequality, culture, race, immigration, knowledge, theory, qualitative methods, and comparative sociology. She has studied the role of symbolic boundaries in the production of inequality; working class and upper-middle class culture, the transformation of collective identity, including among North African-immigrants living in France; rhetorics of racism and anti-racism and scripts concerning cultural membership; destigmatization strategies and their impact on health; the role of culture in poverty; the institutionalization of academic excellence; national cultural repertoires; models of evaluation and justification; and the institutional and cultural conditions that lead to successful societies.

During the 2006-2007 academic year, Professor Lamont held the Matina Horner Professorship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, where she completed a book titled How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment, to be published by Harvard University Press. The book draws on interviews with scholars who serve on funding panels to analyze cultures of excellence across disciplines.

In the context of an international collaborative project, Professor Lamot is also studying everyday antiracist strategies in Brazil, Israel, and the United States with the support of grants from the National Science Foundation and the Weatherhead Initiative for International Affairs. As program director at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, she is engaged in a ten-year interdisciplinary project on social inclusion and other conditions that lead to "successful societies." Working together with other CIFAR project members, she recently completed a collected volume, Successful Societies: Institutions, Culture Repertoires, and Health, to be published by Cambridge University Press.

Other ongoing projects include:

Knowledge Production and Evaluation in the Social Sciences (funded by the Russell Sage Foundation, organized in collaboration with Charles Camic and Neil Gross). Two conferences have been held at the Radcliffe Institute and the Russell Sage Foundation. A collective volume is in preparation and should come out in 2009.

Exploring Culture and Poverty (funded by the Ford Foundation, organized in collaboration with David Harding and Mario Small). A conference will be held in Chicago in December 2008. A special issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences is in preparation.

Successful Interdisciplinarity (funded by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, conducted in collaboration with Veronica Boix-Mansilla and Kyoko Sato). This project analyzes the development of shared cognitive platforms in the research networks of the Santa Fe Institute, the MacArthur Foundation, and CIFAR.

"Towards a Sociology of Valuation: Convergence, Divergence, and Synthesis." (with Ezra Zuckerman). In preparation for the Annual Review of Sociology.

Real Estate Agents as Cultural Brokers (funded by the Real Estate Initiative, Harvard University, in collaboration with Lauren Rivera.)

Selected publications
Please note that posting of both published and unpublished papers for downloading is intended for educational purposes only and that adherence to copyright laws is assumed.

Culture, Inequality, and Boundaries
Money, Morals, and Manners: The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class (1992) The interviews used for this book are available on line: click here.
Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality (1992)
"How Culture Matters for the Understanding of Poverty: Enriching our Understanding." Chapter in The Color of Poverty: Why Racial and Ethnic Disparities Exist, edited by David Harris and Ann Lin. Russell Sage Foundation. (With Mario Small; forthcoming)
"Unesco Background Paper on Cultural Diversity and Poverty Eradication" (with Mario Small; 2007)
"The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences" (with Virag Molnar; 2002)
"Boundary Processes: Recent Theoretical Developments and New Contributions" (with Mark Pachucki and Sabrina Pendergrass; 2007)

Racism, Race, and Immigration
The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration (2000) The interviews used for this book are available on line: click here.
The Cultural Territories of Race: Black and White Boundaries (2000).
"Race-bridging for Christ? Conservative Christians and Black-White Relations in Community Life." (with Paul Lichterman and Prudence Carter; forthcoming)
"Sur les frontières de la reconnaissance. Les catégories internes et externes de l'identité collective" (with Christopher Bail; 2005)
"Everyday Anti-Racism: Competence and Religion in the Cultural Repertoire of the African American Elite" (with Crystal Fleming; 2005)
"North African Immigrants Respond to French Racism: Demonstrating Equivalence Through Universalism" (with Ann Morning and Margarita Mooney; 2002)
"Ordinary Cosmopolitanisms: Strategies for Bridging Racial Boundaries among Working Class Men" (with Sada Aksartova; 2002)
"How Blacks Use Consumption to Shape their Collective Identity: Evidence from African-American Marketing Specialists" (with Virág Molnár; 2001)

Definitions of Excellence in Higher Education
How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment (forthcoming, 2009; Harvard University Press)
“Fairness as Appropriateness: Negotiating Epistemological Differences in Peer Review.” (with Grégoire Mallard and and Joshua Guetzkow; 2008)
"Beyond Blind Faith: Overcoming the Obstacles to Interdisciplinary Evaluation" (with Grégoire Mallard and Joshua Guetzkow; 2006)
"What is Originality in the Humanities and the Social Sciences?" (with Josh Guetzkow and Gregoire Mallard; 2004)
"From Character to Intellect: Changing Conceptions of Merit in the Social Sciences and the Humanities, 1951-1971" (with Angela Tsay, Andrew Abbott, and Joshua Guetzkow; 2003)
"The Best of the Brightest: Definitions of the Ideal Self among Prize-Winning Students" (with Jason Kaufman and Michael Moody; 2000)
"How to Become a Dominant French Philosopher: The Case of Jacques Derrida" (1987).

Comparative Sociology and Qualitative Methods
Rethinking Comparative Cultural Sociology: Repertoires of Evaluation in France and the United States (with Laurent Thevenot; 2000)

Contemporary Sociological Theory
"Betwixt and Between: Recent Cultural Sociology in Europe and the United States" (with Robert Wuthnow; 1990) in Frontiers of Social Theory: The New Synthesis , edited by George Ritzer.
"The Power-Culture Link in Comparative Perspective," Comparative Social Research, 1989
"Cultural Capital: Allusions, Gaps and Glissandos in Recent Theoretical Developments" (with Annette Lareau; 1988)


Social Inclusion, Health, and Successful Societies
Successful Societies: How Institutions and Cultural Repertoires Affect Health and Capabilities (edited with Peter Hall); Introduction, and a chapter: "Destigmatization Strategies and their Impact on Health and Boundaries: Social Inclusion as Dimensions of Successful Societies." For a summary of their project, see "What makes a society succeed?" and "Successful Societies".

Part of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, the Successful Societies Program was established to rethink the fundamental ways in which social relations condition the collective well-being of societies. Many of the findings of social science bear on this issue but the question is rarely asked in such frontal terms. Moreover, the studies that bear on it are fragmented by divisions among disciplines and intellectual approaches. Some see the crux of the issue as one of creating wealth, others as one of social ties, and others as one of institutions or culture, each viewed from a variety of perspectives. Those perspectives are rarely linked to one another and even more rarely connected to work in epidemiology or the biological sciences that also focuses on human well-being. Our goal, admittedly ambitious, has been to bridge some of these gaps and, in so doing, to reach a deeper understanding of how culture and institutions work.

On the premise that the well-being of a community depends on an inter-connected set of outcomes, we have construed collective development broadly to encompass the capacity of societies to develop non-violent inter-group behavior, civic participation, cultural tolerance, social inclusion, access to education and employment, and positive health outcomes. It can be measured by indicators such as low infant mortality, high life expectancy, high educational achievement among children of immigrants, high self esteem among workers, and low violence. In general, we think a successful society is one that enhances the capabilities of people to pursue the goals important to their own lives, whether through individual or collective action.

08/13/2008

Courses Offered This Academic Year

A Sampling of Courses Offered in Other Years

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