Dear Colleagues,

I thought this could be of interest to some of the members of this list, notably those interested in the history of social sciences.

Kind regards,

Pedro

Pedro Nuno Teixeira
Vice Rector - Academic Affairs - U. Porto, Portugal
Director - CIPES - Centre for Research on Higher Education Policies
Associate Professor - Faculty of Economics - U. Porto
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De: [log in to unmask] [[log in to unmask]] em nome de Cshe Departmental [[log in to unmask]]
Enviado: quarta-feira, 4 de Fevereiro de 2015 20:19
Para: Cshe Departmental
Assunto: New Release: Neil Smelser's Wanderlust in Academia

ANNOUNCEMENT: NEIL J. SMELSER,WANDERLUST IN ACADEMIA



The Center takes great pleasure in announcing the autobiography of Neil J. Smelser, University Professor Emeritus of Sociology and past Center Director.  Entitled Wanderlust in Academia, the autobiography is available on-line at the Center’s eScholarship site<http://escholarship.org/uc/item/9j2082pm>.

The title reflects a life and career that followed multiple paths: teaching and research in UC Berkeley’s Department of Sociology; service to the campus and the University of California as a whole in the Academic Senate and beyond; and national service to the profession of sociology and to the world of foundations and public policy.  He was inspired to write Wanderlust in Academia  after engaging in interviews with the University’s Regional Oral History Office  (see “Neil Smelser: Distinguished Sociologist, University Professor and Servant to the Public.”http://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/roho/ucb/text/smelser_neil.pdf).  Interviewer Lisa Rubens observes that “…animating all his work is an effort to understand and explain human behavior and experience to himself and his many publics.”  In his Foreword to the oral history, Jeffrey C. Alexander comments further, “His story spans the entire second half of the 20th century, and it is still going strong.  It recounts intellectual and civic accomplishment of the highest order…”  In writing Wanderlust in Academia, Professor Smelser knitted disparate themes across the span of his life, distinguishing the threads of his experience as they formed a complex whole.

Professor Smelser's research has focused on what he calls the "macroscopic social structural level" of collective behavior, including economic sociology, social change, and the sociology of education.  He is a former president of the American Sociological Association, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. He has also served as director of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.  He joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1958 and has authored fifteen books, including The Theory of Collective Behavior.

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