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.