William Julius Wilson, the Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor at Harvard University, has been named the winner of the 2013 Daniel Patrick Moynihan Prize. He will receive the prize on Thursday, May 9, in Washington DC, at the Academy’s annual gala dinner at the Newseum. The same day, in Washington, Wilson will deliver the inaugural Daniel Patrick Moynihan Lecture on Social Science and Public Policy.
“Bill Wilson is one of the most influential social scientists of the twentieth century and, arguably, one of the great American scholars of our time,” said AAPSS President Douglas S. Massey. “His work on poverty, race, space, and class has had an enormous influence in shaping debates in academic as well as policy circles. It seems particularly fitting that the Moynihan Prize will be awarded to him at a time when inequality has once again risen to the top of the American agenda and the plight of the American underclass demands thoughtful attention from policymakers and scholars more than ever before.”
Wilson’s best-known research has been detailed in books that have become essential reading for scholars and policymakers concerned with social welfare and equality of opportunity in America: The Truly Disadvantaged, The World of the New Urban Poor, The Declining Significance of Race, and, most recently, There Goes the Neighborhood: Racial, Ethnic, and Class Tensions in Four Chicago Neighborhoods and Their Meaning for America. In 2010, he was a contributor to the May volume of The Annals, “Reconsidering Culture and Poverty,” which sparked a resurgence in the debate about culture’s impact on poverty. Wilson has received numerous honors and awards, including 44 honorary degrees, the Seidman Award in Political Economy—he is the first and only noneconomist to receive this award—and the American Sociological Association’s Award for Public Understanding of Sociology.
