Liah Greenfeld
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Liah Greenfeld holds the position of University Professor and Professor of Political Science and Sociology, as well as Director of the Institute for the Advancement of the Social Sciences, at Boston University.
Greenfeld has published widely on questions of art, economics, history, language, literature, philosophy, politics, religion and science, and is a world-renowned scholar specializing in the study of England/Britain, France, Germany, Israel, Japan, the Netherlands, Russia/Soviet Union, and the U.S. Upon publication of her first major work, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (1992), Greenfeld emerged as a preeminent authority on nationalism, a stature that was only reinforced through publication of The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth in 2001.
Greenfeld received her doctoral degree from the department of sociology and social anthropology of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1982 and that fall assumed her first teaching position in the United States as a post-doctoral instructor at the University of Chicago. She held positions of Assistant and the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of Social Sciences at Harvard between 1985 and 1994, and in 1994 joined Boston University as a University Professor and Professor of Political Science and Sociology. At various periods, she has also held visiting positions at RPI, MIT, and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and was a recipient of Olin, Earhart and N.R.C. fellowships. Moreover, she was a member of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University and a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, D.C.
In 2002, she received the Kagan Prize of the Historical Society for the best book in European History (for The Spirit of Capitalism ) and in 2004 was chosen to deliver the Gellner lecture at the London School of Economics. In the past five years, her teaching has increasingly concentrated on the mind in the context of culture, which has led to her current interests in neuroscience and the comparative study of creative imagination.
In another life – before she moved with her parents from Russia to Israel in 1972 – she tried her hand at, first, being a child prodigy, playing violin on TV at the age of 7, and then at poetry, receiving the Krasnodar Region's Second Prize for it (and a bust of Pushkin) at 16 and publishing a collection of poems, under a properly Russified alias in Komsomol'skaya Pravda.
[edit] Bibliography
- (1988) Center: Ideas and Institutions, ed. with Michel Martin, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226306860.
- (1989) Different Worlds: A Sociological Study of Taste, Choice and Success in Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521360641.
- (1992) Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674603184.
- (2001) The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674006143.
- (2006) Nationalism and the Mind: Essays on Modern Culture. Oxford: Oneworld. ISBN 185168459X.
