Michèle Lamont

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Michèle Lamont is the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies and a professor of sociology and African and African American studies at Harvard University. She has done extensive research on racial and class boundaries in France and the United States. She has written widely in the fields of inequality, culture, race, immigration, qualitative methods, and comparative sociology. Her publications include The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration (Harvard University Press, 2000), which won the 2000 C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems and the 2001 Mattei Dogan Award from the Society for Comparative Research. She has also been studying everyday antiracist strategies in various contexts.

While at Radcliffe, Lamont will complete a book titled Cream Rising: Finding Excellence in the Social Sciences and the Humanities, to be published by Harvard University Press. The book draws on interviews with scholars who serve on funding panels and analyzes actual templates of excellence across disciplines.

Before she joined Harvard University in 2003, Lamont taught at Princeton University for fifteen years. She obtained a BA and an MA in political science at Ottawa University and completed her doctorate at the Université de Paris in 1983. She is chair of the Council for European Studies and has received grants and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the National Science Foundation, and the Russell Sage Foundation, among other organizations.