BU Sociology

Liah Greenfeld has been widely published on questions of art, economics, history, language and literature, philosophy, politics, religion, and science, and has studied the cultures of England/Britain, France, Germany, Israel, Japan, the Netherlands, Russia/Soviet Union, and the USA. Upon the publication of Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Harvard University Press, 1992), she has emerged as a preeminent authority on nationalism, a distinction reinforced by the publication of The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth (Harvard University Press, 2001).

Professor Greenfeld received her doctoral degree from the department of sociology and social anthropology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1982. That very fall she assumed her first teaching position in the United States as a post-doctoral instructor at the College of the University of Chicago. Following that, she held the positions of Assistant as well as John L. Loeb Associate Professor of Social Sciences at Harvard University between 1985 and 1994, and in 1994 joined Boston University as a University Professor and Professor of Political Science and Sociology. During various periods she has held visiting positions at R.P.I., M.I.T., and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She has also been a recipient of Olin, Earhart and N.R.C. fellowships, a member of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, and a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, D.C. In 2002, she received the Kagan Prize from The Historical Society for the best book in European History (The Spirit of Capitalism.) And in 2004, she was chosen to deliver the Gellner lecture at the London School of Economics.

In the past five years, her teaching has increasingly concentrated on the mind in the context of culture, which has led her to her current interests in neuroscience and the comparative study of creative imagination.

In another life--before she moved with her parents from Russia to Israel in 1972--she tried her hand at being, first, a child-prodigy, playing violin on TV at the age of 7, and then a poet, receiving the Krasnodar Region's Second Prize for it (and a bust of Pushkin) at 16 and publishing a collection of poems, under a properly Russified alias in Komsomol'skaya Pravda.