Orlando Patterson - January 30, 2006

John Cowles Professor of Sociology, Harvard UniversityPhoto of Orlando Patterson

"The Privatization of Freedom in America: What It Means for Individuals and Democracy"

(in conjunction with the Martin Luther King, Jr., Committee)

8:00 PM Monday, January 30, 2006
University Theatre

Winner of the National Book Award in 1991 for the first volume of Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, Professor Patterson is an authority on slavery and race relations in America.  He is now completing the second volume of this study.  In his lecture, he will discuss his recent research on the deeper meanings of freedom held by Americans.

"The Medieval and Christian Sources of Modern Freedom"

(In conjunction with the Martin Luther King, Jr. committee and the Philosophy Forum)

3:10 PM Monday, January 30, 2006
Gallagher Business Building 123

You are cordially invited to attend a seminar with Orlando Patterson.  After receiving a Ph.D. in Sociology from the London School of Economics in 1965, he taught at that institution before taking a position at Harvard University in 1969.  He twice has won Harvard’s Walter Channing Cabot Faculty Prize, in 1983 and 1997.  His other awards include the American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship (formerly the Sorokin Prize) in 1983, the American Political Science Association’s Ralph Bunche Award for the Best Scholarly Work on Pluralism also in 1983, and the National Book Award for Non-Fiction in 1991.  He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation.  Long dedicated to a study of slavery and its consequences, he has published the following books:

  1. The Sociology of Slavery:  Jamaica, 1655-1838 (1967);
  2. Ethnic Chauvinism:  The Reactionary Impulse (1977);
  3. Slavery and Social Death:  A Comparative Study (1982);
  4. Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (vol. 1, 1991);
  5. The Ordeal of Integration:  Progress and Resentment in America’s “Racial” Crisis (1997); and
  6. Rituals of Blood:  Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (1999).

Professor Patterson has published three novels:  The Children of Sisyphus (1964), An Absence of Ruins (1967), and Die the Long Day (1972).  His short stories have been anthologized, and he regularly publishes reviews and critical essays.

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