| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Craig Calhoun | | | Institution: | Arizona State University | | | Year Elected: | 2012 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 301. Anthropology, Demography, Psychology, and Sociology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1952 | | | | | | |
Craig Calhoun is University Professor of Social Sciences at Arizona State University. He had served as President of the Social Science Research Council from 1999 to 2012, while also University Professor of Social Sciences and Director of the Institute of Public Knowledge at New York University. From 2012 to 2016, he was Director of the London School of Economics and Social Science, after which he was President of the Beggruen Institute from 2016 until 2018. Calhoun received his doctorate from Oxford University and has also been a professor and dean at the University of North Carolina and a visiting professor in Asmara, Beijing, Khartoum, Oslo, Paris, and Berlin.
Under Calhoun’s leadership, the SSRC initiated major projects on public social science, global security and cooperation, gender and conflict, digital media and learning, the privatization of risk, religion and the public sphere, intellectual property rights, humanitarian emergences, HIV/AIDS, the social sciences in Africa, trans-regional integration in Asia, and a range of other issues. It has also substantially increased the number of fellowships it offers annually.
As an individual scholar Calhoun has done research on a variety of themes in historical sociology, political economy, social movements, social theory, and the history of social sciences. His publications include The Roots of Radicalism: Tradition, the Public Sphere, and Early 19th Century Social Movements (Chicago 2012), Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream (Routledge 2007), Nationalism (Minnesota 1997), Critical Social Theory: Culture, History and the Problem of Specificity (Blackwell, 1995), and Neither Gods Nor Emperors: Students and the Struggle for Democracy in China (California 1994). Calhoun edited a three-volume collection, Possible Futures (NYU 2011), which explores the impact of financial crisis, the challenges of global governance addressing issues from war to climate change, and the future of development. | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Jon Elster | | | Institution: | Columbia University | | | Year Elected: | 2012 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 304. Jurisprudence and Political Science | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1940 | | | | | | |
Jon Elster (Ph.D., University of Paris, 1972) taught at Paris, Oslo and Chicago before coming to Columbia. His publications include Ulysses and the Sirens, Sour Grapes, Making Sense of Marx, The Cement of Society, Solomonic Judgements, Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences, Local Justice, Political Psychology, Alchemies of the Mind, Ulysses Unbound, and Closing the Books: Transitional Justice in Historical Perspective. His research interests include the theory of rational choice, the theory of distributive justice, and the history of social thought (Marx and Tocqueville). He is currently working on a comparative study of constitution-making processes from the Federal Convention to the present and is engaged in a project on the microfoundaitons of civil war. | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. Renée Claire Fox | | | Institution: | University of Pennsylvania | | | Year Elected: | 2012 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 301. Anthropology, Demography, Psychology, and Sociology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1928 | | | Death Date: | September 23, 2020 | | | | | | |
Renée C. Fox, a summa cum laude graduate of Smith College, earned her Ph.D. in Sociology in 1954 from Radcliffe College, Harvard University, where she studied in the Department of Social Relations.
Before joining the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in 1969, she was a member of the Columbia University Bureau of Applied Social Research, taught for twelve years at Barnard College, and then spent two years as a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard. At the University of Pennsylvania, she was a professor in the Department of Sociology with joint, secondary appointments in the Departments of Psychiatry and Medicine, and in the School of Nursing; and she held an interdisciplinary chair as the Annenberg Professor of the Social Sciences. From 1972-1978 she was the Chair of the Penn Sociology Department. On July 1, 1998, she became the Annenberg Professor Emerita of the Social Sciences. She is also an Emerita Senior Fellow of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania.
Renée Fox’s major teaching and research interests - sociology of medicine, medical research, medical education, and medical ethics - have involved her in first-hand, participant observation-based studies in Continental Europe (particularly in Belgium), in Central Africa (especially in the Democratic Republic of Congo), and in the People’s Republic of China, as well as in the United States. She has lectured in colleges, universities, and medical schools throughout the United States, and has taught in a number of universities abroad. During the 1996-1997 academic year, she was the George Eastman Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford.
Her books include: Experiment Perilous: Physicians and Patients Facing the Unknown; The Sociology of Medicine: A Participant Observer’s View; Essays in Medical Sociology; In the Belgian Château: The Spirit and Culture of a European Society in an Age of Change; In the Field: A Sociologist’s Journey, and (in co-authorship with Judith P.Swazey), The Courage to Fail: A Social View of Organ Transplants and Dialysis, Spare Parts: Organ Replacement in American Society, and Observing Bioethics. Her most recent book is her "ethnographic autobiography," In the Field: A Sociologist’s Journey, published in 2010.
Fox is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and an Honorary Member of Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society. She is the holder of a Radcliffe Graduate School Medal, and of a Centennial Medal from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University, and is a recipient of the American Sociological Association’s Leo G. Reeder Award for Distinguished Contributions to Medical Sociology. She has received several teaching awards: an E. Harris Harbison Gifted Teaching Award of the Danforth Foundation, and a Lindback Foundation Award for Teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds eleven honorary degrees, and in 1995, the Belgian Government named her Chevalier of the Order of Leopold II. In October 2007, she was the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities. In 2015 she was the recipient of the Hastings Center for Bioethics' Henry Knowles Beecher Award.
She died on September 23, 2020, at age 92. | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. Alice Kessler-Harris | | | Institution: | Columbia University | | | Year Elected: | 2012 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 303. History Since 1715 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1941 | | | | | | |
Alice Kessler-Harris is currently the R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History in Honor of Dwight D. Eisenhower at Columbia University.Born in England, she received her Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 1968. She won the Bancroft Prize from Columbia University in 2001 and the Philip Taft Prize from Cornell University in 2001 and 2007. She is the author of: The Open Cage: An Anzia Yezierska Collection, 1979; Women Have Always Worked: A Historical Overview, 1981; Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States, 1982; A Woman's Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences, 1990; In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth Century America, 2001; and Gendering Labor History, 2007. She is a member of the American Studies Association (president, 1992); Law and Working Class History Association (president, 2008); and the Organization of American Historians (president-elect, 2009).
Alice Kessler-Harris is a pioneering historian of a labor history that embraces women as well as men and a writer who regularly engages the deep moral and political questions that have shaped American life. She is associated with devising the concept of "economic citizenship" and tracing its development through the course of the 20th century, challenging established understandings of Social Security and other federal policies that affect all citizens. Her two major books are each based on over a decade of archival research. She has written or edited nine more books and
more than 60 essays and articles, some, like "Organizing the unorganizable" (1975), "Treating the male as other" (1993), and "Coalitions of the imagination" (2004) have become classics. Kessler-Harris is unusual among social historians for her attentiveness to the arts and to literature; she played a major role in introducing the Yiddish writer Anzia Yezierskia to the American public. She is now engaged in writing a biography of Lillian Hellman, which is forthcoming in 2012. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2012. | |
| 5 | Name: | Dr. Christopher A. Sims | | | Institution: | Princeton University | | | Year Elected: | 2012 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 302. Economics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1942 | | | | | | |
Christopher A. Sims is the Harold H. Helm '20 Professor of Economics and Banking at Princeton University. Born in Washington, DC he earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1968. He won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2011. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1988), National Academy of Sciences (1989), and American Economic Association (president, 2011- ).
There are relatively few cases in which it can be said that a single person revolutionized an entire mode of intellectual inquiry, but that is the case with Christopher Sims and time series econometrics. His 1972 result that postwar data confirmed the existence of a unilateral causal relationship from money supply to GDP strongly influenced subsequent research on monetary policy. Subsequently, he single-handedly invented the Vector Autoregression (VAR) technique, and he has been a leader in many of the subsequent refinements and extensions of VAR methodology as well. Before Sims’ seminal work, there was a seemingly-unending battle over which variables were "exogenous" and which were "endogenous." For example, how can the government’s fiscal and monetary policy decisions be considered exogenous, when they likely respond to macroeconomic events? The VAR technique virtually ended that debate by treating all variables symmetrically (for example, tax cuts influence GDP, but GDP also influences tax cuts), and looking to learn about the macroeconomy via timing relationships. VARs are now ubiquitous in macroeconomics, which was and remains Sims’ main field of interest; indeed, virtually every empirical paper in macroeconomics begins (and many end) with VARs. But VARs are also used outside the realm of macroeconomics - almost anywhere time series data is analyzed. They have become the standard way to ferret out the "stylized facts." There is an old saying "let the data speak"; VARs have become the language through which time series data speaks. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2012. | |
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