Book signing immediately following the lecture. To purchase your book go to: amzn.to/19zYle1

Robert D. Putnam is the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard. 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, the world's highest accolade for a political scientist, and in 2012, he received the National Humanities Medal, the nation’s highest honor for contributions to the humanities. 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. The London Sunday Times has called him “the most influential academic in the world today.”

He has written fourteen books, translated into twenty 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 are among the most cited publications in the social sciences worldwide in the last half century.

About the Eckstein Lecture:
Established in 1999, the annual Eckstein Lecture recognizes Harry Eckstein for his scholarly contributions to the study of democracy and his role in cofounding the UCI Center for the Study of Democracy. Eckstein was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1970-99), fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (1958-59), Guggenheim fellow (1974), American Political Science Association vice president (1981-82), editor (1960-63) and member of the editorial board of World Politics (1960-80), a founding member of the editorial board of Comparative Political Studies (1966-99), IBM Professor of International Studies at Princeton University (1969-80), UC Irvine's first Distinguished Professor (1980-93) and then Distinguished Research Professor (1993-99) of political science at UC Irvine. Eckstein came to the United States as a young child as part of an exodus from the Third Reich that became known as the One Thousand Children. 

Visit www.uci.edu for campus map directions. For additional information, call 949-824-2904. No videotaping or cell phone use during the lecture.