Liah Greenfeld

Liah Greenfeld is University Professor and Professor of Sociology, Political Science, and Anthropology, Boston University and is the author, among other publications, of Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth, and Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience (Harvard University Press, 1992, 2001, 2013), which form a trilogy. The latest volume, focusing on the existential experiences of modernity, offers a novel interpretation and a causal explanation of schizophrenia and manic-depressive illness (see review in the American Journal of Psychiatry, February 2014).

Professor Greenfeld held the positions of Assistant as well as John L. Loeb Associate Professor of Social Sciences at Harvard University from 1985 until1994, when she joined Boston University in her current appointment. She has also held visiting positions at RPI, MIT, and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and has been a recipient of the UAB Ireland Distinguished Visiting Scholar Award, fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, D.C., the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, Israel, and grants from Mellon, Olin, Earhart, The National Council for Soviet & East European Research, and The German Marshall Fund of the United States. In 2004, she delivered the Gellner lecture at the London School of Economics on the subject of “Nationalism and the Mind,” launching the research connecting her previous work on modern culture to a new perspective on mental illness, and in 2011, the Tom Nairn Lecture at the Globalism Research Center, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia.