Biennial Lecture Series

Upcoming 2010:
The Center on Urban Research and Public Policy is pleased to announce that its 2010 Biennial Lecturer is William Julius Wilson, the Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyer University Professor at Harvard University and the Director of Harvard’s Urban Poverty Research Program.  Professor Wilson is one of only l9 University Professors, the highest professional distinction for a Harvard faculty member.  Joining the faculty at Harvard in July of l996, he was previously the Lucy Flower University Professor and Director of the University of Chicago’s Center for the Study of Urban Inequality.  Past President of the American Sociological Association, Wilson has received 42 honorary degrees, including honorary doctorates from Princeton, Columbia, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, and Dartmouth, as well as the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. A MacArthur Prize Fellow from l987 to l992, Professor Wilson has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Education, the American Philosophical Society, the Institute of Medicine and the British Academy, among others.  He is the author of numerous award winning volumes, including The Declining Significance of Race; The Truly Disadvantaged; There Goes the Neighborhood:  Racial, Ethnic and Class Tensions in Four Chicago Neighborhoods and their Meaning for America; and When Work Disappears, among many, many other books.

His lecture on urban America will be delivered on Tuesday, October 19, 2010 at Washington University in St. Louis on the Danforth Campus in the afternoon.  The event is free and open to the public with a reception immediately following.

Fall 2008 Lecture with Douglas Massey:
The Center on Urban Research and Public Policy hosted its first Biennial Lecture Series in Fall 2008. Douglas S. Massey, the Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at the Wooddrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University was the first Biennial Lecturer. Having served on the faculties of the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania, Professor Massey is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. His research focuses on international migration, race and housing, discrimination, education, urban poverty, and Latin America, especially Mexico, He is the author of Return of the L-Word: A Liberal Vision for the New Century (Princeton University Press 2005) and Strangers in a Strange Land: Humans in an Urbanizing World (Norton 2005). Professor Massey is currently president of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences and past presdent of the American Sociological Association and the Population Association of America. His visit to Washington University in St. Louis was October 20-21, 2008. His guest lecture was free and open to the public, with a reception immediately following.