| 1 | Name: | Dr. Stanley Lieberson | |
| Institution: | Harvard University | ||
| Year Elected: | 2007 | ||
| Class: | 3. Social Sciences | ||
| Subdivision: | 301. Anthropology, Demography, Psychology, and Sociology | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Deceased | ||
| Birth Date: | 1933 | ||
| Death Date: | March 19 2018 | ||
Stanley Lieberson was the Abbott Lawrence Lowell Research Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. He was born in Montreal and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. After two years at Brooklyn College, he was admitted to the graduate program at the University of Chicago, where he earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology. He taught at a number of institutions and had been a Professor of Sociology at Harvard University since 1988. Lieberson was named the Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor of Sociology in 1991. Much of his career involved work on race and ethnic relations in both the United States and elsewhere. His dissertation won the University's Colver-Rosenberger Prize, and was later revised and published by the Free Press as Ethnic Patterns in American Cities. He wrote a number of other books dealing with race and ethnic relations, along with numerous papers on this topic in the leading journals. One of these books, A Piece of the Pie: Blacks and White Immigrants Since 1880, received the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award of the American Sociological Association. In later years, he had developed two new interests: one is a re-examination of the reasoning underlying our research. This led to the publication of Making It Count: The Improvement of Social Research and Theory. The second new interest was in using first names to study how tastes and fashions operate and, in turn, contribute to an understanding as to how cultural change occurs. A Matter of Taste: How Names, Fashions, and Culture Change (Yale University Press, 2000), used first names as a way to uncover the stunningly orderly mechanisms underlying changes in tastes and fashions, as well as cultural changes more generally. The book was the co-winner, Best Book in the Sociology of Culture, Culture Section (2001) from the American Sociological Association, and the winner of the Mirra Komarovsky Book Award, Eastern Sociological Society (2002). Lieberson's long-term project was to develop a new approach to a wide variety of issues connected with the use of evidence in the non-experimental social sciences. Lieberson was a President of the American Sociological Association, the Sociological Research Association, and the Pacific Sociological Association. He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality at Stanford University. He was the co-recipient of the Paul M. Lazarsfeld Award for contributions in Methodology from the American Sociological Association. Lieberson was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and was named an honorary member of the Harvard College chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2007. Stanley Lieberson died March 19, 2018, at the age of 84, in Newton, Massachusetts. | |||