Robert D. Putnam, PhD
Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Biography
Robert D. Putnam, PhD
Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy
Harvard University
Robert D. Putnam is the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard, and Visiting Professor and Director of the Graduate Programme in Social Change, University of Manchester (UK). He was the 2006 recipient of the Skytte Prize, the most prestigious international award for scholarly achievement in political science. The London Sunday Times has called him “the most influential academic in the world today.”
He has written a dozen books, translated into twenty languages, including the best-selling Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, and Better Together: Restoring the American Community, a study of new forms of social connectedness. His Making Democracy Work was praised by the Economist as “a great work of social science, worthy to rank alongside de Tocqueville, Pareto and Weber.” Both Making Democracy Work and Bowling Alone rank among the most cited publications in the social sciences worldwide in the last half century.
Putnam has worked on these themes with Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush, as well as with British Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, Libya’s Muammar Gadhafi, and many other national leaders and grassroots activists around the world. He founded the Saguaro Seminar, bringing together leading thinkers and practitioners from across America to develop actionable ideas for civic renewal.