The Kohli Foundation for Sociology is delighted to announce this year’s laureate of the Kohli Prize for Sociology. This year’s prize goes to Michèle Lamont. With her path-breaking comparative research on culture, social inequality and inclusion, she has made a significant imprint on sociological knowledge.
We are already looking forward to the award ceremony at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center on 13 November 2024.
About Michèle Lamont
Michèle Lamont is Professor of Sociology and of African and African American Studies and the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies at Harvard University. Born in 1957, she grew up in Quebec and studied political theory at the University of Ottawa before obtaining a doctorate in sociology at the University of Paris in 1983. After completing post-doctoral research at Stanford University, she has served on the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin (1985-87), Princeton University (1987-2002) and Harvard University (2003-present). A cultural and comparative sociologist who studies inclusion and inequality, she has researched how we evaluate social worth across societies, the role of cultural processes in fostering inequality, symbolic and social boundaries, and the evaluation of knowledge, as well as topics such as dignity, stigma, racism, class cultures, collective well-being, social resilience, and social change. Her books include Money, Morals and Manners: the Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class (1992), The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration (2000), How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgement (2009), Getting Respect: Responding to Stigma and Discrimination in the Us, Brazil and Israel (coauthored, 2016), and Seeing Others: How Recognition Works and How It Can Heal a Divided World (2023). She is also the author of several collective works, and over a hundred articles published in American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Annual Review of Sociology, Human Nature Behavior, and other prominent outlets. She served as the 108th president of the American Sociological Association in 2016-17. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Science, the American Philosophical Society, the Royal Society of Canada, and the British Academy. Honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Carnegie Fellowship, Leverhulme Fellowship, the 2014 Gutenberg award, the 2017 Erasmus Prize, the 2024 Kohli Prize for Sociology, and honorary doctorates from six countries.