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.
A cultural and comparative sociologist who studies inclusion and inequality, she has tackled topics such as dignity, respect, stigma, racism and stigma, class and racial boundaries, social change, and how we evaluate social worth across societies and academic disciplines. She is the author of five monographs, including her most recent Seeing Others: How Recognition Works and How It Can Heal a Divided World (Simon & Schuster, 2023), more than a dozen 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 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. She served as the 108th president of the American Sociological Association in 2016-17. Recent honors include: a Carnegie Fellowship, a Leverhulme Fellowship, the 2017 Erasmus Prize, the 2024 Kohli Prize for Sociology, and honorary doctorates from six countries.
At the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, she chairs the Seminar on Social Exclusion and Inclusion.
Photo Credit: Regine Henrich
