Piotr Sztompka
Professor of Theoretical Sociology, Jagiellonian University, Krakow
Piotr Sztompka was born in 1944, graduated in law and
sociology and received his Ph.D. from the
Jagiellonian University in
Krakow. He spent a year of his postdoctoral studies at the University
of California,
Berkeley, and Harvard University and since
1974 he has been at the Jagiellonian University, where he is now
Professor of Theoretical Sociology. He has been a visiting professor
at universities in the United States (17
times), Mexico, Argentina,
Australia and Europe, and has been awarded Fellowships
at five Institutes for
Advanced Study. He is a member of Polish,
European and American Academies of Sciences. From 2002 to
2006,
he served as elected President of the International Sociological
Association (ISA).
In 1995, he was awarded the New Europe Prize by the SIAS
group, and is also an FNP (the Foundation
for Polish Science)
Prize laureate and a recipient of the Polish Prime Minister’s award.
In addition, he has
received the Pitirim Sorokin Prize and an
honorary doctorate from the Russian State Social University in
Moscow, and recently the title of doctor honoris causa from Södertörn
University in Stockholm.
Sztompka’s most important books include System and Function:
Toward a Theory of Society (1974);
Sociological Dilemmas: Toward a
Dialectic Paradigm (1979); Robert K. Merton: An Intellectual Profile
(1986), published also in Chinese; Society in Action: The Theory
of Social Becoming (1991); The Sociology
of Social Change (1993),
published also in Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Indonesian
and Japanese;
Trust: A Sociological Theory (1999), published
also in Chinese and Russian; and Cultural Trauma and
Collective
Identity (co-authored, 2005). The Polish textbook Socjologia:
analiza spoleczeństwa [Sociology:
Analysis of Society], which also
came out in Russian, became a national bestseller, selling approx.
60,000
copies.
Apart from sociological theory, philosophy of the social
sciences, and social change, his recent academic
interests include
visual sociology and sociology of everyday life. At SCAS, he will
work on completing a
major theoretical monograph on the
Anatomy of Interhuman Space.
This information is accurate as of the academic year 2014-15.