Michèle Lamont
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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. Born in 1957, she grew up in Quebec and studied political theory at the University of Ottawa before obtaining a doctorate in sociology at the University of Paris in 1983. After completing post-doctoral research at Stanford University, she has served on the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin (1985-87), Princeton University (1987-2002) and Harvard University (2003-present). A cultural and comparative sociologist who studies inclusion and inequality, she has researched how we evaluate social worth across societies, the role of cultural processes in fostering inequality, symbolic and social boundaries, and the evaluation of knowledge, as well as topics such as dignity, stigma, racism, class cultures, collective well-being, social resilience, and social change.
She served as the 108th president of the American Sociological Association in 2016-17. 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.
In June 2025, she joins the IAS for a one-month writing residency.
Research interests
Culture, race, recognition, worth, hope
Recognition, Globally
Building on Seeing Others, which is largely US-focused, this research project will examine recognition in the context of global social change, with the goal of deepening our understanding of social inclusion. It will mobilize three comparative case studies to consider similarities and differences between three types of recognition: political recognition for the “invisible” working class youth in the US and the UK; environmental recognition for two indigenous groups in Micronesia and Eastern Canada; and recognition at work for high tech creators involved in the global production of video games. While the first study concerns the political impact of misrecognition, the second and third address the human consequences of the environmental racism and the global transformation of work through technology. Each concerns recognition in a different context of uncertainty. Globalization, environmental justice, indigenous studies, and high-tech work are burning topics of social science research today.
Each comparative case study includes 40 to 60 in-depth interviews in different national contexts (for a total of nearly 300 interviews): 1) Manchester, UK, and Manchester, New Hampshire, for the case of political voice among working-class individuals (18-30 years old); 2) Eastern Canada (Ottawa River/Kishi Zibi) and the Northern Mariana Islands (NMI) in the South Pacific, for the case of environmental justice claims among indigenous people; and 3) London, Montreal, Paris, and Seoul for video games production. These interviews are conducted in collaboration and consultation with experts and graduate research assistants. The research will result in several co-authored scientific papers as well as a single-authored narrative monograph written as a travelogue, which invites readers to follow along as Recognition Globally is explored.
Key publications
Lamont, Michele, Seeing Others: How Recognition Works and How It Can Heal a Divided World, New York: One Signal, Simon and Schuster; London: Penguin, 2023.
Lamont, Michele, Graziella Moraes Silva, Jessica S. Welburn, Joshua Guetzkow, Nissim Mizrachi, Hanna Herzog, and Elisa Reis, Getting Respect: Responding to Stigma and Discrimination in the United States, Brazil, and Israel, Princeton University Press, 2016.
Lamont, Michele, Money, Morals, and Manners: The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class, University of Chicago Press, 1992.
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