University of Chicago sociologist William Julius Wilson will deliver this year’s Tanner Lecture on Human Values. Titled “The New Urban Poverty and the Problem of Race,” the lecture will begin at 4 p.m. Friday (Oct. 22) in Rackham Auditorium.
A panel of three scholars will respond to Wilson’s lecture in a symposium at 9:30 a.m. Oct. 23 in the Henderson Room, Michigan League. Both the Tanner Lecture and the symposium are free and open to the public.
Wilson is the award-winning author of The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, The Underclass, and Public Policy and the Lucy Flower University Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at the University of Chicago, where he also directs the Center for the Study of Urban Inequality.
A MacArthur Prize Fellow, Wilson is past president of the American Sociological Association and serves as president of the Consortium of Social Science Associations. He also is the author of Power, Racism, and Privilege: Race Relations in Theoretical and Sociohistorical Perspectives and The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions, among other publications.
The Truly Disadvantaged was selected as one of the best books published in 1987 by the New York Times Book Review editors.
Participants in the Oct. 23 symposium include Theda Skocpol, professor of sociology, Harvard University; Roger Wilkins, the Clarence J. Robinson Professor of History and American Culture, George Mason University; and Terry Williams, associate professor of sociology, New School for Social Research.
The Tanner Lecture on Human Values is funded by a grant from Obert C. Tanner and is established at six universities in the United States and in England: the U-M, Utah, Harvard, Stanford, Oxford and Cambridge.
Previous U-M Tanner lecturers have included novelists Amos Oz and Toni Morrison and political economist and historian Albert O. Hirschman.
