William Julius Wilson - January 27, 2005
Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy John F. Kennedy School of Government Harvard University
"The World of the New Urban Poor"
8:00 PM Thursday, January 27, 2005
University Theatre
A MacArthur Prize Fellow and named by Time magazine in 1996 as one of America's 25 Most Influential People, William Julius Wilson is a seminal thinker on race relations in America. He will speak about his current research on the increasing concentration of poverty in large central cities.
"The Roots of Racial Tensions"
3:40 PM Thursday, January 27, 2005
(in conjunction with the Martin Luther King, Jr., Committee and the Philosophy Forum)
You are cordially invited to attend a seminar with William Julius Wilson. He received his Ph.D. in sociology and anthropology from Washington State University in 1966. He then taught sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, before joining the University of Chicago faculty in 1972. In 1990 he became the Lucy Flower University Professor and Director of the University of Chicago's Center for the Study of Urban Inequality. Since 1996, he has been a member of the Harvard University faculty. Past president of the American Sociological Association, he has received 39 honorary degrees. Professor Wilson is the recipient of the 1998 National Medal of Science, the highest scientific honor in the United States. In 2003, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences gave him the Talcott Parsons Prize in the Social Sciences.
Among Professor Wilson's voluminous publications are the following prize-winning books:
- The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions (1978)
- The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (1987)
- When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (1996)
- The Bridge over the Racial Divide: Rising Inequality and Coalition Politics (1999)
These four books have been translated into numerous foreign languages and have become standard works in the field of sociology. The seminar will be based on the ideas of his forthcoming book from Knopf, The Roots of Racial Tensions: Urban Ethnic Neighborhoods.