Sennett insignito della Centennial Medal 2017

Premio. Richard Sennett è stato insignito dalla Harvard University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences con la «Centennial Medal 2017», un prestigioso riconoscimento alla carriera che gli è stato attribuito per il rilevante contributo dato in campi disciplinari decisivi per la conoscenza scientifica del mondo contemporaneo:

«Richard Sennett is a scholar of tremendous range and wide interests. His academic appointments span multiple disciplines and multiple continents. He is a sociologist and historian, and also a novelist; a musician who trained at Juilliard, and a leader who has served as an advisor to UNESCO and as president of the American Council on Work. The breadth of his professional and intellectual career perhaps explains why his scholarship has so powerfully 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.


Sennett is University Professor of the Humanities at New York University, where he founded The New York Institute for the Humanities, and Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he has led the Cities Programme, an innovative center for graduate teaching and research on urban issues. He also holds an appointment as a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge and has received numerous honorary degrees, awards, and distinctions.

When Sennett earned his PhD in the history of American civilization at Harvard in 1969, a revolutionary new form of historical writing was just beginning to take shape: the new social history, a “history from the bottom up” that shifted away from telling the stories of history’s traditional protagonists—political figures, military heroes, and other elites—to focus instead on the lives of ordinary people. While other social historians might get caught up in documenting the mundane details of everyday life, Sennett has displayed a remarkable ability to see the big picture and ask the big questions that have brought deep meaning to this new mode of history.

According to Lizabeth Cohen, Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies, Sennett’s ability to broaden the scope of the ideas that social history could address has opened vast new possibilities for other scholars. “His books are maps for historians to fill in,” says Cohen. “Richard understands the big changes happening over historical time—he sees the vast terrain—and then he asks the big questions that set the agenda for historians.”

Sennett’s prolific and wide-ranging bibliography includes The Hidden Injuries of Class, co-authored with Jonathan Cobb, which gives voice to the emotional pain of undervalued blue-collar workers in American society; The Corrosion of Character, a groundbreaking study of the world of new capitalism, where there are more incentives for people to reinvent themselves rapidly than to maintain a steady sense of personal character; and The Fall of Public Man, which examines a pronounced change in the nature of public life and political involvement over the course of two centuries of Western history—a text that Homi Bhabha, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities and Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center, identifies as an important precursor to the growth of cultural studies.

As president of the American Council on Work in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Sennett led a forum, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, on the changing pattern of American labor. Looking back on that forum, Bhabha says of Sennett, “I remember with great fondness and admiration his ability to bring together thinkers, artists, and scholars from a range of perspectives with the purpose of creating collective conversations on some of the most important cultural issues of our times.” Just last year, Sennett and Bhabha collaborated on a United Nations project, for which Sennett once again convened a range of scholars and activists involved with the major issues of urban transformation, assembling a diversity of perspectives that reflects his own tremendous capacity for expansive thought.

Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Research Professor of English Literature and Professor of African and African American Studies, admires Sennett for his unfailing ability to generate new agendas and projects. “Richard is extraordinarily attuned to aesthetics and art, as well as deeply engaged with social inequality and the changing world of global labor relations,” Sollors remarks. “Many of his peers would be proud to have worked in just one of the many areas Richard has taken on.”

Richard Sennett, for your pathbreaking work on the sociology of cities, communities, and cultures, and for your willingness to ask the big questions that expand our conversations about the social bonds and systems that shape our personal lives, we are proud to award you the 2017 Centennial Medal.»