The UCI Center for the Study of Democracy, Program in International Studies and Department of Political Science present the 2010 Harry Eckstein Lecture:

"American Grace:  The Changing Role of Religion in America"
with Robert D. Putnam, Harvard University
          
Friday, February 26, 2010
2:00 – 3:30 p.m.
UCI Student Center, Emerald Bay Rooms AB

This lecture is free and open to the public.

For further information, please contact the CSD Center Administrator, csd@uci.edu.

About the speaker:
Robert D. Putnam is the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard, where he teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses. He also directs the Manchester Graduate Summer Programme in Social Change at the University of Manchester (UK) where he is a visiting professor. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the British Academy, and past president of the American Political Science Association. In 2006, Putnam received the Skytte Prize, one of the world's highest accolades for a political scientist. Raised in a small town in the Midwest and educated at Swarthmore, Oxford, and Yale, he has served as dean of the Kennedy School of Government.

He has written a dozen books, translated into seventeen languages, including the best-selling Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, and more recently, Better Together: Restoring the American Community, a study of promising new forms of social connectedness. His previous book, 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 high among the most cited publications in the social sciences worldwide in the last several decades.

He consults widely with national leaders, including U.S. Presidents Bush and Clinton, British Prime Ministers Blair and Brown, Ireland's Bertie Ahern, and Lybia's Muammar el-Qaddafi. He founded the Saguaro Seminar, bringing together leading thinkers and practitioners to develop actionable ideas for civic renewal.

His earlier work included research on comparative political elites, Italian politics, and globalization. Before coming to Harvard in 1979, he taught at the University of Michigan and served on the staff of the National Security Council. He is currently working on three major empirical projects: (1) the changing role of religion in contemporary America, (2) the effects of workplace practices on family and community life, and (3) practical strategies for civic renewal in the United States in the context of immigration and social and ethnic diversity.

About the Harry Eckstein Lecture series:

Established in 1999, the Eckstein Lecture recognizes Center for the Study of Democracy co-founder Harry Eckstein for his scholarly contributions to the study of democracy.  Eckstein was a UCI political science distinguished professor from 1980 to 1993 and a political science distinguished research professor from 1993 to 1999. To learn more, visit http://www.democ.uci.edu/education/eckstein.php.