Biographical Note

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A cultural sociologist, Lamont studies inequality, race and ethnicity, the evaluation of social science knowledge, and the impact of neoliberalism on advanced industrial societies. Her scholarly interests center on shared concepts of worth and excellence and their impact on hierarchies in a number of social domains. She has written on topics such as how the meanings given to worth (including moral worth) shape ethno-racial and class inequality; the definitions and determinants of societal excellence; and the evaluation of excellence in higher education. Other areas of interest include group boundaries, how members of stigmatized groups respond to racism and discrimination, how culture matters for poverty, peer review, shared criteria of evaluation for qualitative social sciences, disciplinary cultures, and interdisciplinarity.

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. An influential cultural sociologist who studies inclusion and inequality, she has tackled topics such as dignity, respect, stigma, racism and anti-racism, class and racial boundaries, social change, and how we evaluate social worth across societies. Her most recent book is Seeing Others: How Recognition Works and How It Can Heal a Divided World (Simon and Schuster (US) and Penguin Random House (UK), 2023). Her other 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 Judgment (2009), and the coauthored Getting Respect: Responding to Stigma and Discrimination in the United States, Brazil and Israel (2016). Prominent edited collections include Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality (1992), Reconsidering Culture and Poverty (2010), Rethinking Comparative Cultural Sociology (2000), Social Knowledge in the Making (2011) and Social Resilience in the Neo-Liberal Era (2013).

A committed mentor, she received the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award from the Harvard Graduate Students Association in 2010. Awards for her scholarship include: the C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems for The Dignity of Working Men, the 2014 Gutenberg award, the 2017 Erasmus Prize, the 2024 Kohli Prize for Sociology, and honorary doctorates from six countries. A 2021-22 Carnegie Fellow, she served as President of the American Sociological Association in 2016. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the British Academy, and the Royal Society of Canada, and she became Chevalier des palmes académiques of the French Government in 2014.

Lamont’s intellectual leadership experience includes codirecting a large transnational interdisciplinary program on “Successful Societies” funded by CIFAR from 2002 to 2019. Related to this work, she co-chaired the advisory board to the 2022 United Nations Human Development Report, “Uncertain Times, Unsettled Lives: Shaping our Future in a World in Transformation.” At Harvard, she spearheaded a universal mentoring program for junior faculty as Senior Advisor on Faculty Development and Diversity in the Faculty of Arts and Science in 2009-11. She directed the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, one of Harvard’s most important international studies centers, from 2014 to 2021, and she continues to lead the Weatherhead Research Cluster on Comparative Inequality and Inclusion. Selected boards service includes the Haut conseil de la science et de la technologie (French Government), the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity (Gottingen, Germany), the Graduate Institute for international and Development Studies (Geneva), the Open Society Foundation Fellowship Program, and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. She has been a member of the Board of Directors of the American Council for Learned Societies since 2018.

In recent years Lamont has taught undergraduate courses on “Successful Societies: Markers and Pathways,” “Culture, Power, and Inequality,” “Racism and Anti-Racism in Comparative Perspective,” and “Knowledge Production and Evaluation.” At the graduate level, she has taught “Qualitative Data Analysis,” “Classical Sociological Theory,” and “Culture and Inequality.” Since 2004, she has co-organized the Culture and Social Analysis Workshop in the Department of Sociology, where faculty, post-doctoral researchers, graduate students, and visitors come together to share their work in progress. Since 2005, she has also been the co-organizer of the Study Group on Exclusion and Inclusion at the Center for European Studies.

Born in Toronto in 1957, Lamont grew up in Québec. She received a B.A. (1978) and a Masters (1979) in political theory at Ottawa University, before pursuing her doctoral research in sociology at the Université de Paris, where she graduated in 1983. She held a post-doctoral fellowship at Stanford University (1983-1985) and took her first faculty position at the University of Texas at Austin (1985-1987). Appointed as an assistant professor of sociology at Princeton University in 1987, she was promoted to tenure in 1993, and to the rank of full professor in 2000. She moved to Harvard University in 2003 and was appointed Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies in 2006. She is married to Frank R. Dobbin, has three children, and lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.