Michèle Lamont

Sociologist

Contact Information
Phone:(617) 496-0645
E-Mail: mlamont@wjh.harvard.edu


Biographical Statement

Lamont is Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies and a professor of sociology and African and African American studies at Harvard, and a member of the governing committee of the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy at the Kennedy School, where she directs the European Network on Inequality. She also serves as chair of the Council for European Studies. In 2007, she completed a book titled Cream Rising: Finding and Defining Excellence in the Social Sciences and the Humanities (forthcoming). The book draws on interviews with scholars who serve on funding panels to analyze evaluation and cultures of excellence across disciplines. Together with Peter Hall, she also prepared a collective volume on how institutions and culture mediate the relationship between health and inequality in comparative perspective (under review). She co-directs (also with Peter Hall) the “Successful Societies” program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Her previous publications include The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration (2000), Rethinking Comparative Cultural Sociology: Repertoires of Evaluation in France and the United States (2000), and Money, Morals, and Manners: The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class (1992). At CES, she serves as co-chair of the Exclusion and Inclusion in an Expanded Europe Study Group.