Forum on the Humanities and the Public World

Richard Sennett, Sociologist
"The Decline of the Skills Society"

Friday, December 4, 2009
4:00 pm | Maude Fife Room, 315 Wheeler Hall

A renowned social critic known best for his studies of class and urban society, Richard Sennett is the Centennial Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics, the Bemis Adjunct Professor of Sociology at MIT, and Professor of the Humanities at New York University. His scholarship focuses on social inequality, the effects of urban growth on the individual, and the interconnection between authority, modernism and public life. Professor Sennett has been described as “one of the great urban enthusiasts of our age.”

Highly interdisciplinary in its approach, Sennett’s work draws from the influences of architecture, design, music, art, literature, history, political and economic theory, and anthropology. Professor Sennett’s books include: The Culture of the New Capitalism; Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization; The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities; and The Fall of Public Man, among many others. In his most recent work, The Craftsman, Sennett considers skilled manual labor—from ancient Roman brick makers to contemporary computer programmers—arguing for the value of good craftsmanship even in industrial society.

Professor Sennett is the founding director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU. He has been awarded the Amalfi and Ebert prizes for Sociology, the “Das Politische Buch” (The Political Book) prize, the Hegel Prize, and most recently, the 2008 Gerda Henkel Prize, which recognizes outstanding scholarly achievement in the historical humanities.

Links

Websites:
Official Website

Profile in The Guardian

The New York Institute for the Humanities

Books & Articles:
The Fall of Public Man

Review of The Craftsman, in the “New York Review of Books”

Videos:
”A Walk with Richard Sennett,” UrbanOmnibus

At the Urban Age India Conference, 2007

At the NY Salon