NYU Professor Richard Sennett has won the 2011 Jeanette Schocken Prize for Literature. Sennett, a sociologist, will receive the award, which includes a prize of 7,500 euro, at a ceremony in the German city of Bremerhaven this Spring.
New York University Professor Richard Sennett has won the 2011 Jeanette Schocken Prize for Literature. Sennett, a sociologist, will receive the award, which includes a prize of 7,500 euro (approximately $10,600), at a ceremony in the German city of Bremerhaven this Spring.
Established in 1989 and awarded biannually, the Jeanette Schocken Prize honors the memory of Jeanette Schocken, a Jewish citizen of Bremerhaven who was killed in the Shoah after being deported to the Minsk Ghetto in November of 1941. The prize is administered and funded by individual contributions from citizens of Bremerhaven, a port city that served as the departure point for many forced into exile. Prize winners are determined by a jury comprised of journalists and scholars.
A renowned social critic, Sennett is the author of: The Craftsman (2008); The Culture of the New Capitalism (2006); Respect in a World of Inequality (2003); The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (1998); Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (1994); The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities (1990); Authority (1980); and The Fall of Public Man (1977).
Sennett, also a professor of sociology at the London School of Economics, holds the rank of University Professor at NYU. The title is conferred upon outstanding scholars in recognition of the interdisciplinary dimension of their work.
Sennett is the founding director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, which was established in 1976, and is a member of numerous international associations and scientific academies, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Literature, and the Royal Society of the Arts. In 1998, he was awarded the European Amalfi Prize for Sociology and Social Sciences, followed by the “Das politische Buch” (The Political Book) prize endowed by the Bonn-based Friedrich Ebert Foundation in 1999. In 2006, he was the winner of the Hegel Prize awarded by the city of Stuttgart. In 2008, Sennett received Germany’s Gerda Henkel Prize, which recognizes outstanding scholarly achievement in the historical humanities. In 2009, he won the Heinrich Tessenow Medal, given by Hamburg’s Alfred Toepfer Foundation, for his work in the areas of urban culture and public space, and, in 2010, the Spinoza Prize, a biennial award recognizing contributions to public debate on ethics and morality.