Orlando Patterson

After faculty appointments at the London School of Economics and his alma mater, the University of the West Indies, he moved to Harvard in 1969-70 as a Visiting Professor and, the following year, was appointed there to a Full Professorship in Sociology.

He is the author of ten books and several book-length government reports on urban poverty, prepared while he was special advisor to Prime Minister Michael Manley of Jamaica during the seventies. His first academic work, "The Sociology of Slavery: Jamaica, 1655-1838," published in 1967, explored the problems of slavery and freedom, as well as the roots of racism and poverty in Jamaica, and these have remained his main, lifelong interests, although later explored in comparative terms.

Slavery as a worldwide institution was examined in "Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study," which in 1983, was awarded the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award of the American Sociological Association. He explored the problems of ethnicity and ethnic revivalism in his 1977 book, "Ethnic Chauvinism: The Reactionary Impulse." The first of a two volume historical sociology of freedom, entitled "Freedom in the Making of Western Culture," won the National Book Award for non-fiction in 1991. He is presently completing the second volume of "Freedom," dealing with the modern world, as well as a study of Americans' views of freedom.

Over the past few years Patterson has also explored the intersecting problems of "race," gender and socio-economic change in America with a special reference to Afro-Americans. The first volume of a trilogy in this area, "The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America's "Racial" Crisis" (1997), is available from Basic/Civitas. The second, "Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries" (1998), is also available from Basic/Civitas.

Patterson has also published three novels, "The Children of Sisyphus," which won the prize for best work of fiction in English at the Dakar Festival of Negro Arts in 1965; "An Absence of Ruins"; and "Die the Long Day." He also reaches out to a broader audience in Op-eds and longer articles that have appeared frequently in "The New York Times," "The New Republic," and other publications.

Among Patterson's honors are the U.C.L.A. Medal, and the Order of Distinction of the Government of Jamaica. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.