Professor Richard Sennett Nigel Stead, LSE
Harvard University has awarded LSE Emeritus Professor Richard Sennett the 2017 Centennial Medal for his work in urban sociology.
The award, from Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAC), recognises Professor Sennett’s lifelong contribution to research on city living.
GSAC Dean Xiao-Li Meng said: “Richard Sennett has shaped our understanding of some of the most fundamental questions of modern life: what it means to live in a city and what it means to work. His pathbreaking work on the sociology of cities, communities and cultures has expanded our conversations about the social bonds and systems that shape our personal lives.”
Since the 1990s Professor Sennett has divided his time between New York University and the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Richard Sennett was born in Chicago in 1943. He grew up in the Cabrini Green Housing Project, one of the first racially-mixed public housing projects in the United States.
After graduating from the University of Chicago and Harvard University, he moved to New York where, in the 1970s he founded, with Susan Sontag and Joseph Brodsky, The New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University.
In the 1980s he served as an advisor to UNESCO and as president of the American Council on Work.